Lessons Learned from Thirty Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine Forums - A Retrospective Longitudinal Study
Introduction
Cambridge University Pre-Hospital Care Programme (CUPHCP) is a regional academic teaching charity that delivers free, open-access prehospital medical education mapped to the national pre-hospital faculty curriculum. This programme has delivered thirty monthly academic forums and, in doing so, has developed from a local student society into an internationally-followed organisation; little guidance is available for other organisations attempting a similar expansion. We describe feedback collected over three years and highlight some pivotal changes made and lessons learned over this time for dissemination to other programmes interested in free, open-access modern medical education.
Methods
Exposure consisted of thirty monthly academic forums delivered by experts in prehospital emergency medicine, critical care, and specialist topics such as human factors. Longitudinal feedback was collected from the pre-hospital audience electronically in the form of Likert scoring for each forum with an average of 60 responses per forum.
Forum topics were prospectively categorised as ‘medical’ or ‘peripheral’ based on their targeted curriculum themes. Formal curriculum mapping began in January 2016 as a rolling set of twenty core topics was generated based on the national pre-hospital medicine curriculum. Forums were livestreamed internationally from March 2017. Unpaired t-tests were used to compare the primary outcome of weighted mean forum ratings.
Results
The average forum rating was 4.41/5, with no statistically significant difference between average medical forum (20/30 forums, mean 4.45/5) and average peripheral forum (10/30 forums, mean 4.32/5). Curriculum mapping in January 2016 was associated with a significant increase in average forum score from 4.19 prior to mapping to 4.58 after mapping (p=0.0001). The advent of livestreamed forums in March 2017 was associated with a significant increase in average forum score from 4.33 prior to livestreaming to 4.67 after livestreaming (p=0.0049).
Discussion
CUPHCP has delivered thirty academic pre-hospital medical forums mapped to the national IBTPHEM curriculum with consistently excellent and improving forum ratings. As the nature of shared medical education changes in an increasingly interconnected environment, teaching programmes must accommodate evolving expectations from their audiences. In this study, key interventions of formalising curriculum mapping and livestreaming forums were associated with significant increases in average forum rating. We propose that this may be due to improved relevance and accessibility to our target audience; indeed, the progrmame has received informal reports of its teaching delivered via livestream having been put to use on battlefields and pre-hospital environments the following day. A consistent and diverse committee with a passion for pre-hospital emergency medicine also helped the programme pitch its content to a wide range of backgrounds despite limiting funding.
Based on the above results, we recommend that other organisations interested in delivering regular lectures identify their target audience’s key medical curriculum for examination with the intent of mapping their lecture topics to core elements of the respective curriculum. Carefully selecting content based on audience needs is correlated to improved forum feedback. We also recommend that these organisations also consider expansion into streamed medical education to increase scope of delivery, as well as both asynchronous and synchronous accessibility.
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