"After seeing numbers decline for the course due to pressures on time and resources, we wanted to find a solution to get people back. Working with Nelson Croom has enabled us to find a learner-friendly way to do this."

Jane Tippett, Chair, ATNC

ATNC launches pilot module The Pathophysiology of Shock to test online learning for trauma nurses

The Advanced Trauma Nursing Course (ATNC) is an organisation that runs courses for trauma nurses and aims to provide the skills and knowledge necessary to care for the trauma patient, safely and affectively.

The problem

Each ATNC provides an intensive five day course for 16 nurses led by 5 faculty. Face to face personal interaction between learners and faculty has been an important element in the learning as learners are often of varying experience, some with English as a second language.

The course had been running for 15 years with stable enrolment, but delegate numbers had started to reduce because of pressure on NHS cash and time. To build numbers back up again, the ATNC identified the following objectives that needed to be addressed

• Improve the learning experience - after attending the course some learners felt they lacked the practical experience.
• Get people onto a level playing field - learners come to the course with vastly different experiences of the subject and much time was wasted on the face to face session getting everyone up to speed and to the same level of knowledge.
• Allow for more flexible course delivery - it was difficult to review and assess the learner's needs prior to the course.

The solution

ATNC believed that providing e-learning support for the course would enrich the learning experience and make it more flexible for learners and decided to test this by developing a pilot module online. The Pathophysiology of Shock was chosen as the pilot as in this particular subject, the face to face session was extremely lecture intensive.

By moving content online, it was believed they could make the face to face sessions more practice based, and reduce the lecture time. By asking people to work through the online module before the course, learners should arrive with similar levels of knowledge. The faculty would be able to review and assess learners' prior knowledge from the pre-course short answer paper, which would allow them to adapt the programme and tailor it to the requirements of a particular group of learners.

The programme was developed within the existing Nelson Croom technical shell Imago and is based on existing content that forms part of the ATNC Course.

Nelson Croom worked with the ATNC project team to ensure the content was designed and structured to allow learners to personalise their learning experience. The Learning Centre facilitated a variety of learning styles encouraging the learners to define how they wanted to learn.

The results

The course was developed in under 6 months and enabled the ATNC to successfully pilot a difficult module online. To date every learner who has attended the ATNC programme in the last year has registered and completed the pre-course learning and assessment. Feedback from learners and faculty of the face to face sessions has been universally positive.