Last November we distributed an online survey to both private and public transfusion-specific/multidisciplinary laboratories to identify transfusion-related education requirements.
We had responses from metropolitan and regional Australia across a range of laboratory roles. We’re very excited to announce that the majority of respondents considered the Blood Service as the most highly valued transfusion education provider!
The biggest issues identified in transfusion-relation education, training and competency were:
- maintaining skills and knowledge
- time constraints for ongoing training
- lack of competency based training (CBT)/ education in specific topics, and
- lack of resources and guidance to perform CBT.
To address this, suggested actions from laboratory managers included:
- regular ongoing education and training
- provision of online educational resources and CBT guidelines, and
- allocating time for education and training and more effective rostering.
It appears that participation in education and training is either a job requirement or is self-directed by those who enjoy learning.
The most preferred learning option included short, case-based, online education that was relevant, easy to use and had the ability to exit/resume at any time.
By gaining an understanding of what topics you would like to learn about and how you would prefer to receive this information, we will be able to customise our transfusion-related education to better meet your needs.