Practice based small group learning during a pandemic: an evaluation from Defence Primary Healthcare

ABSTRACT

The educational benefits of Practice-Based Small Group Learning (PBSGL) are well known. The Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom employs a salaried healthcare workforce across the globe with staff frequently moving. Given the success of PBSGL in Canada and Scotland, PBSGL was introduced as a large pilot to assess it as a continuous professional development (CPD) resource. A survey gathering quantitative and qualitative was distributed to the pilot population after using PBSGL for 12 months. This showed the favoured types of CPD were PBSGL and taught CPD update courses. Themes identified from free-text comments were: developing professional educational networks during Covid; evolving themes of CPD; applying learning to practice; practical aspects of delivering CPD to Defence promoting a positive learning environment; human interaction is therapeutic. These were similar to educational and non-educational benefits found in previous evaluations, but with the added benefit of providing a professional educational network during the COVID pandemic. Benefits were preserved when the sessions were run remotely using video-conferencing, although some of the human interaction was lost. As CPD, it was highly valued. For Defence, who need to consider the CPD requirements of their workforce, provision of PBSGL alongside taught CPD updates may satisfy the learning needs of the majority of the workforce.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical education
• continuous professional development

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all respondents for their time in completing the survey. In addition, the authors thank Defence Medical Services Research and Clinical Innovation for funding the licenses.

Ethical approval

As the research was a service evaluation of an educational intervention, in accordance with Joint Service Publication 536, ethical approval was not applied for (21). Licenses were funded by DPHC

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14739879.2022.2115406

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.