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Learning together: sharing continuing education with other healthcare professionals and with patients

For healthcare professionals, developing technical and interpersonal skills takes on a new dimension when continuing education is shared with members of different professions, or even with patients.

In its special August issue and during the 2012 Prescrire Encounters, both dedicated to the theme of “Working together in the name of better care”, the French journal Prescrire has featured continuing education initiatives that involve members of different healthcare professions: physicians, pharmacists, nurses.

For example, in the French countryside known as the “Pays diois” (a mountainous area in France’s Drôme region), members of the various healthcare professions have long been holding regular meetings together as a shared continuing-education exercise and to resolve organisational issues in their work, most notably via simple protocols that are adapted to the situation and developed collaboratively.

The posters available online HERE give details about many experiences of this type involving different healthcare professionals.

Learning together is also possible when it comes to patients and healthcare professionals.

In 2009 in France’s Rhône-Alpes region, a shared educational programme helped to resolve mutual misunderstanding between healthcare professionals and certain patients. For the professionals, it was a question of gaining knowledge from patients’ life experiences. Continuing education for professionals is carried out with and by persons who have had challenging life experiences: travellers, persons from developing countries, migrants, street people.

In another example, the French group Ciane (Collectif interassociatif autour de la naissance, or the inter-association collective around birth), made up of users of the French healthcare system, has been leading an independent, transparent campaign since 2003 to improve the quality of perinatal care in France. Ciane calls upon healthcare professionals to think collaboratively about certain practices based on the clinical evidence. This was the case for episiotomy: Ciane took action to reduce the number of episiotomies, which were being performed too systematically in France (see the video available, in French, HERE).

©Prescrire 1 August 2012

Special issue of La revue Prescrire "Travailler ensemble" Rev Prescrire 2012; 32 (346). Click here for the table of contents (in French).
For more information:

Contents of the special issue
of La revue Prescrire
"Travailler ensemble pour
mieux soigner. Pourquoi ?
Quand? Comment ?"
Free (in French)

 VIDEO  The plenary sessions
of the 2012 Prescrire Encounters
Free (in French)

Posters from the
2012 Prescrire Encounters
Free (in French)