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Excellence in Staff Development
Excellence in
Staff Development
This category is looking at education improvement or innovation in fields of: Program design, delivery, assessment and accreditation; professional development, skills maintenance and practice standards, including community education; and research and/or innovation supporting evidence-based practice. Previous submissions looked at leadership development, programs implemented around mental health of Ambulance staff, and community education campaigns. Each service is challenged to explore areas where improvements have been made in staff development, and how these resonating changes have improved the evolution of paramedicine.
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Excellence in Staff Development Pandemic Response: Workforce surge experience - Issues and Lessons
NSW Ambulance
Team: Mike Richer
Our aim was to identify strategies ensuring workforce capacity could be maintained. This included identifying and operationalising additional workforce capacity. We targeted three primary areas where additional surge was required and a source available, these being: • Paramedics
• Clinical Assistants
• Emergency Call Takers The project goals were to identify, recruit, train and deploy these workforces in a timely manner and at times where greater impact was predicted. To achieve these goals, significant modifications and enhancements were necessary to existing methods and resources. This included identifying skilled and available applicants, rapid recruitments strategies, development of alternative onboarding educational delivery methods and production of learning materials. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the government, the community, and its health system with multiple challenges over an extended period. Ambulance services across the globe have had to consistently develop and implement strategic and tactical responses to these challenges over the last two years. Surging the frontline workforce at different stages of the pandemic has been an important strategy in supporting maintenance of service delivery, staff safety and wellbeing. The ability to identify and recruit safely on-board and deploy this workforce has required unprecedented commitment to innovation, integration, and agility across all parts of a large and complex organisation. It has also required consultation and collaboration with multiple external stakeholders spanning the state, including Ministry of Health, education and health service providers, and peak clinical and industrial bodies. NSWA Education embarked on a project to support the workforce surge plans in preparing and designing, implementing, and reviewing three separate programs all designed to provide a safe, confident, fit for purpose surge workforce. Nearly 1,000 paramedics and call takers have been inducted as part of this surge workforce since the first program in 2020. This is in addition to standard recruitment.
Excellence in Staff Development Mental Health Continuing Education Package
Ambulance Victoria
Team: Dr. Megan Dobbie (Team Leader), Kaitlyn Harrington, Felicity Garland and Claire Henley The Mental Health Continuing Education Package provides AV’s operational workforce with the skills and confidence to respond to the increased frequency and complexity of mental health presentations.
The training project sought to: • improve patient care by ensuring that patients with mental health concerns received best-practice, patient-centred support; • minimise the potential harm caused by AV’s systems, practices and biases, to ensure that all patients receive the care they need, at the time that they need it;
• increase the competence and confidence of
AV staff; and
• reduce the anxiety of operational staff when working with this diverse and complex patient cohort.
AV is responding to increasing numbers of mental health cases, and patients with more complex needs. The Mental Health Continuing Education Package was developed to increase the confidence and capability of operational AV staff (paramedics and first responders) when treating patients with mental health disorders. The project involved research, design, development and delivery of mandatory mental health training for development of operational staff. The training package provided practical strategies and tools on how to best work with patients who present with acute mental health symptoms.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the training was adapted into online learning modules, increasing accessibility for staff who could complete the training at a time and place of their choosing. Since mid-2021, 75 per cent of operational staff have commenced or completed the training. The remaining 25 per cent are expected to complete the training by June 2022.
Participant feedback from 145 respondents to a survey seeking feedback on the training indicated that 82 to 86 per cent were satisfied or very satisfied with the training, and the vast majority believed their learning could be successfully implemented in the field.
Excellence in Staff Development Graduate Ambulance Paramedic Improvement Program
Ambulance Victoria
Team: Lauren Olney (Leader), Peta Reilly, Lisa Bourke, Paul Giagnacovo and Nicole Magnuson, The primary goals of the project were to increase the number of students completing the program within 12 months and to improve the graduate paramedic experience.
Alongside this were a variety of objectives, including: • Map learning tasks to Paramedic Competencies, enabling consistent and objective assessment. • Implement appropriate systems to ensure program governance, accountability and transparency. • Better support graduates’ psychological health and wellbeing, and physical safety. • Provide opportunities for graduates to participate in structured, off-road training days to support transition to practice and development needs.
• Reduce the incidence of performance management initiated by not passing the final program assessment at first presentation.
• Provide graduates some scope to self-manage and progress at their own pace, acknowledging that personal circumstances, types of case presentations, area of work, workload and other factors that can delay or enable progress. • Implement a structured supervision framework in which Team Managers, Clinical Instructors and other support staff would actively monitor graduates, identifying and addressing areas of risk. • Implement a student management system which enables the graduate, program staff and all paramedic support staff to track a graduate’s progress in real time and access the learning history of the graduate if required. Following a review of AV’s Graduate Ambulance Paramedic program, AV’s Commencing Practice Team identified the opportunity to improve the experience of graduates and to increase the number of graduates who successfully completed the course within the scheduled 12-month timeframe.
Over the following three years, the Commencing Practice Team developed a more supportive and robust program, starting with organisation-wide consultation and benchmarking with similar programs in other jurisdictions. The result was a new program in which roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and embedded to support and develop graduates and the learning framework is progressive, objective and standardised, with multiple checkpoints to report, action and support graduates to develop their clinical, operational and safety competencies.
The new program was launched in March 2018, with a three-year trial period. Evaluation in March 2021 demonstrated that the new program was highly successful, with over 90 per cent of graduates completing their program within 12 months (compared to 50 per cent under the old program) and the vast majority of graduates who responded to surveys feeling that the new program prepares them well for their AP12 year.
Excellence in Staff Development Shocktober
Ambulance Victoria
Team: Joel Marley (leader), Phil Cullen, Andrea Lenaghan, Julian Hanton, Tahryn Mant, Rebecca Danslow and Reyyan Atmaca,
Cardiac arrest survival rates in Victoria plummeted by 50 per cent during the first three months of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown.
As the state’s frontline emergency health provider, Ambulance Victoria (AV) needed to mitigate this crisis and equip Victorians with essential, life-saving skills in the event of cardiac arrest.
The resulting month-long awareness and education campaign named October as ‘Shocktober’, promoting the need for education in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and the three critical steps to save a life: ‘Call, Push, Shock’.
The campaign also encouraged Victorians with these life-saving skills to register on the GoodSAM app – a free, global smartphone app alerting registered responders that someone nearby is in cardiac arrest. GoodSAM responders can then support the patient until paramedics arrive.
Their project also aims to: • Increase AED registration on AV’s website so the public can find a device in the event of cardiac arrest.
• Increase community awareness of AEDs, how to use them and where they are located.
• Encourage schools, businesses and sporting grounds to make their AEDs publicly accessible. Following the success of the 2020 campaign, Shocktober was held again in 2021, proving to be one of the most successful community engagement campaigns ever undertaken by AV. It resulted in:
• 134 online sessions delivered, reaching over 6,900 Victorians.
• 1,010 community members registered via the
GoodSAM app.
• More than 510,000 people reached through
Shocktober-related social media posts. Shocktober is now a permanent fixture on AV’s community engagement calendar.
Ambulance Victoria
Team: Justin Dunlop (Team leader), Michael Stephenson, Matt McCrohan, Kathryn Haden, Brett Drummond, Olivia Howarth, Simon Jensen, Michael Wood and Danielle Saxton,
The ability to staff peak periods when all available local ambulance resources are deployed is a problem faced by ambulance services worldwide. Solving this issue would smooth performance and guarantee better care to thousands of Victorians in the AV setting, and many more on a global scale.
The project aimed to develop a surge workforce to supplement the paramedic workforce during a period of increasing demand and staff shortages due to COVID-19. The project activated the ‘Mutual Assistance’ clause of AV’s Bioevent Subplan to the AV Emergency Response Plan demand management strategy, which enables AV to access emergency support and resources from other services, private providers, and the Victorian and Commonwealth Governments.
The key objectives were to: • Prepare to manage a significant loss of staff and/or significant increase in workload. • Use a surge workforce as a force multiplier for the available paramedic skillset to increase the probability of success in delivering best care. • Ensure the safety of surge responders and the paramedic workforce.
• Ensure clinical safety for patients.
• Maintain service to the community during a period of extreme duress in the health system.
• Develop training systems that enable rapid and effective deployment of a second tier, non-paramedic workforce.
All relevant partner agencies engaged to provide direct support to AV entered into a memorandum of understanding with AV. Student paramedics were directly employed by AV, leveraging existing education partnerships with universities.
Personnel were screened and selected based on a range of key criteria focused on suitability and safety.
Individuals received tailored training based on existing skills and experience, with a focus on occupational and patient safety. The training programs used AV’s systems and services, including online learning, information systems, peer support and welfare services as well as a dedicated forum for surge responders. Trained surge responders were rostered with qualified paramedics to support the delivery of exceptional patient care. The surge responders also provided a safe and stable driving platform to carry patients to hospital. The surge workforce provided approximately 120 rostered shifts each day during the peak of the Omicron outbreak. The expanded workforce allowed AV to manage demand as needed. This successful program demonstrated the efficacy of AV’s longstanding contingency to use a temporary surge workforce in response to extreme demand.
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