Wellspect Education – a new resource for healthcare professionals, users and carers

Wellspect Education is a part of our new service offering, Wellspect With You. An online learning tool for all healthcare professionals who want to develop, broaden or deepen their knowledge around bladder or bowel management, and for users and carers or anyone with an interest in the field of continence care to access training, resources and downloadable content. 

 The online tool is arranged around three central pillars:

LEARN

Refresh your knowledge of the essentials with these foundational articles.

TEACH

Take your understanding of the basics to the next level, equip yourself and train your colleagues or patients with the aid of tutorials, webinars and downloadable documentation.

EXPLORE

Immerse yourself in literature and scientific documentation and go into greater depth within a clinical area.

Patricia McDermott is Consultant clinical nurse specialist at Princess Elizabeth Hospital. Patricia's team won three Nursing Times awards for an innovative study that recommends the use of intermittent catheterization in place of an indwelling catheter for patients at emergency departments.

Helen Greenham, a continence care specialist at Birmingham NHS Community Trust, has nearly thirty years experience in providing clinical care for her patients, supervision for specialist and community nurses and clinical training for carers, specialist nurses and community teams. 

Helen, in your capacity as a clinical trainer, how useful would this be as a training tool?

As a trainer, what I find very useful is how the information is pitched at different levels of expertise, so I can adjust the material to the group I'm training. For me as a trainer, I can also access the latest research in the field of continence care.

Patricia - was it easy navigating the site, and finding the information you wanted ?

First impressions – it's easy to navigate, and the filtering is very useful. The content is organized well and I was able to locate specific literature easily.

The pandemic has limited how we interact – could Wellspect Education be integrated into your interactions with your patients and students?

Patricia:
We've had to limit our numbers while working because of the pandemic – what has been particularly helpful has been the convenience of being able to refer a student nurse to the material so they can expand their knowledge while I attend to a patient.

At the basic level, I can introduce resources to patients, carers and care assistants, and in multi-disciplinary meetings with my colleagues, I've taken the opportunity to refer them to the research that's available in the tool – it's a wide range of people who can benefit from this learning tool.

Helen:
It's been a steep learning curve for someone like me; there have been positives and negatives to this pandemic, but we've all had to rely on digital tools to carry out our tasks and engage with everyone.

To be honest, it's all really useful for when I deliver training. As I mentioned, the teaching sessions are useful, and for myself, as a trainer, I can find the research I need without having to wade through tracts and tracts of data before finding it.

The teaching sessions can be accessed anywhere 

What did you personally find useful in your professional capacity?

Patricia:

Everything is there, it has good building blocks for expanding knowledge for the basic level to the advanced literature for specialists. I found the the Tips and Tricks for IC and TAI especially useful, and even if this is your chosen field of specialty, the material for training helps freshen your approach to training.

Helen:

I've found it very versatile; the teaching sessions can be accessed anywhere – at home or at work, and with a tool like this, I can reference material from Wellspect Education and pitch it at the relevant level of learning.

It's an intuitive tool and easy to use.