We launched the Medicines Learning Portal website www.medicineslearningportal.org in 2016 to teach junior hospital pharmacists in the NHS how to solve clinical problems about medicines.
This free-to-view site was developed with support from Health Education England and many others.
By July 2017 it had received over 250,000 visits and the site is endorsed by the professional body for pharmacists, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
The site covers a range of topics including injection compatibility, side effects, prescribing in pregnancy, and managing medicines in patients with liver and renal disease.
Each tutorial provides core clinical knowledge, and then assesses the learner’s ability to apply this knowledge to a range of scenarios using case studies, scenarios, and quizzes. More specialist clinical topics such as palliative care are also included.
There is a section on Professional Skills that aims to support learners in making decisions in challenging situations, as well as developing their communication, calculation, and evaluation skills. A recent addition has been the On-call section which allows junior pharmacists to rehearse their behaviour when faced with problems about medicines out of hours.
ADVANTAGES OF USING A WEBSITE FOR TEACHING:
1. It’s cheap and easy The site cost a few hundred pounds to create and about £50 per year to run. No special IT skills are required if you use a website development service like WordPress or Blogger.
2. Partnership working A website enables us to share our learning with the rest of the NHS and develop new partnerships. Partners improve our content, publicise our work, and help us keep the site up-to-date.
3. Quick to update Practice changes all the time. We can amend the site whenever we want, by adding new subjects or updating existing topics. We can also respond quickly to user feedback.
4. Reducing duplication, saving time The site has quickly become a national resource so it has cut down duplication of teaching resources between Trusts. We go to great efforts to link to quality teaching materials produced by other providers too, so we have created a ‘joined up’ learning environment.
5. Improved standards Because most UK Trusts now use the site, we can aim to standardise the teaching of clinical problem solving in the first 1000 days of a postgraduate pharmacist’s development.
6. Flexibility A website enables learning without having to organise a study day, and learning can take place at any time of the day that suits the learner, even when a tutor is not available.
7. Trust publicity Our site is free and used widely across the whole NHS so it’s great publicity for our host Trust (University Hospital Southampton NHS FT). It says we are a progressive, innovative Trust and keen to share our expertise to benefit the wider NHS.
USER FEEDBACK:
A national survey of over 300 learners and tutors in 2017 showed high user satisfaction.
More importantly, 95% of respondents said that the Learning Portal helped pharmacists to make decisions about medicines, and 83% agreed that it helped pharmacists to care for patients.