Excellence in Staff Development Ambulance Victoria Points of View Clinical Discussion and Learning Series

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Matthew Humar, Dr David Anderson, Bart Cresswell, Toby St Claire, Andrew Keenan

Ambulance Victoria’s (AV’s) Quality and Patient Experience (QPE) Division is committed to looking after patients, staff, and volunteers through learning from and sharing patient care stories and experiences. AV’s ‘Points of View’ Clinical Discussion and Learning Series helps build a culture of continuous learning and safety for staff and volunteers to speak up and participate in open and transparent conversations around patient safety. Traditionally, communications around clinical review learnings had occurred through written documents, email updates, and content on Workplace (AV’s internal social media platform), supported by education delivered by senior operational leaders and managers. AV identified an opportunity to be more proactive and interactive.

The Patient Review Team (part of the QPE Division) recognised it could engage more deeply and transparently with staff and volunteers through relatable, helpful, and accurate topics on patient care, and by providing opportunities to ask questions, access resources, and encourage and support extended insights.

To achieve this, the project team proposed a new approach to clinical learnings – the ‘Points of View’ Clinical Discussion and Learning Series, which would:

• support existing communications and education.

• qualify as professional development.

• occur regularly (at least quarterly).

• be accessible through an engaging multi-media platform.

• focus on topics/themes informed by AV’s patient safety data, as well as best practice benchmarks, latest research, and staff and volunteer requests.

• engage AV staff and volunteers in the learnings associated with quality reviews.

• give a voice to operational staff and volunteers involved in clinical cases with adverse events and meaningful organisational learnings.

• enable staff and volunteers to directly share personal and professional learnings in a facilitated, supported, and educational space.

• empower operational staff and volunteers to role model peer review techniques, authentic vulnerability, and humility in leadership, fostering a culture of patient safety by levelling hierarchical relationships between operational, quality review and senior operational leadership staff and volunteers.

• welcome matter experts from outside AV to share best practice and the latest research.

The series enables peer-review, panel-style, collaborative discussions of case learnings. Staff and volunteers can directly contribute to and lead the conversation, share thoughts, questions, and feedback before, during and after events, and access recorded sessions they were unable to attend live.

Significantly, staff and volunteers can now directly contribute to organisational clinical development goals.