Education for Health [EfH] is a registered long-term condition charity based in Warwickshire and operating nationally, whose goal is to improve health and wellbeing for people living with long-term conditions through direct support, education and training to healthcare professionals. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the greatest health challenges of a generation, EfH too has had to adapt in new ways to see out the storm.
Reflecting on the many challenges that the pandemic had posed to date, EfH chief executive Linda Edwards told The Parliamentary Review that the health crisis left the charity in an ironic and rather difficult place.
Edwards said: “Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, sessions were principally run from our headquarters in Warwickshire along with locally commissioned courses across the UK. Post-lockdown, we found ourselves in a different place. Here we were, a charity that provides respiratory education and training to healthcare professionals, amid a respiratory pandemic, yet the very people we could help were working long hours on the front line and unable to devote any time to training; and all our income dried up.”
As was the case with so many other organisations and businesses stricken by Covid, the key to EfH’s survival lay in its ability to adapt. Recognising that healthcare professionals did not have the time nor the energy to devote to education, EfH came up with the idea that it could contribute to the cause by building easily digestible resources for frontline healthcare personnel.
First and foremost, however, came an opportunity to make maximum use of the government’s lifeline for businesses: the Job Retention Scheme.
Edwards explained: “We quite literally held our breath, furloughed 70 per cent of our staff, worked long hours on reduced pay and created a plan. What drove us on was our inability to contemplate closing down when healthcare professionals needed our help. Many were being moved from their normal specialties into urgent and acute respiratory care. They were tired and confused, with education being the furthest thing from their mind, and yet the need was great.
“Within six weeks of lockdown we had created a Respiratory Failure Toolkit, an online comprehensive suite of resources for clinicians managing very sick respiratory patients. The design was practical and engaging, equipping practitioners with the necessary clinical skills, while ensuring that they looked after themselves as they worked long hours on the front line. Despite the lack of funding, with the goodwill of a team of experts, we released the toolkit free to anyone with an NHS email address; over 600 clinicians accessed the resource.”
With such a high uptake of the online resource, Edwards paid tribute to her organisation’s ability to create something innovative and different which enabled health education in some capacity to continue in urgent times. The next challenge was then to gauge how EfH could build on that momentum, and the solution lay in the use of technology once more.
“We had succeeded in creating a model of delivery that worked, enabling people to access learning at a pace and style that suited them. Knowing this, the next step was to start to plan how we could use this knowledge to create a holistic model of education and training, a model that would work for the changed and differing needs of healthcare professionals”, Edwards said.
“Testing the new model with a handful of our courses and modules, we created our Interactive Blended Online Learning approach: interactive because it contains activities and practical tasks and importantly has dedicated live tutor time; blended because it combines the best of eLearning with interactivity; and online because that is the vehicle for delivery.
“The next step was to begin to shift all our respiratory academic courses into a similar format to understand how translatable this model was. Progress felt slow; we still had 70 per cent of staff furloughed and everyone else was working at full stretch. However, looking back, we moved mountains and achieved what had once seemed impossible.”
By September 2020, EfH had succeeded in transitioning all its academic courses over to the Interactive Blended Online Learning model it had created, and piloted respiratory refresher facilitated workshops using a similar model to keep educational resources easily accessible for healthcare workers.
Having successfully navigated the Covid-19 pandemic to date, Linda Edwards’ hope - and indeed that of everyone at EfH - is that funding will be made available to support healthcare professionals to continue to upskill and be able to support patients. It is a tremendous challenge, yet Edwards believes that the experience of managing through a crisis as intense as the pandemic will hold the charity in good stead for the future.
“At EfH, we know that by supporting those who work in general practice and primary care, we can make the biggest difference and help increase the number of people living well with long-term conditions. Our biggest challenge is the ever-changing NHS landscape, buffeted by the winds of political change and worldwide impact brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There is still much to do, but we have become wiser and more confident, innovative and solution focused. Our biggest concern is whether there will be funding available to support healthcare professionals in developing the skills they need to support patients in improving their health and wellbeing. However, we are confident that we have a key role to play in supporting the NHS workforce, with the flexibility and knowhow to respond to these ever-changing needs.”
