Will Egan is the Chief Strategy Officer at Ausmed. Ausmed is an online, continuous professional development (CPD) platform, designed for a modern healthcare workforce to complete and comply with mandatory CPD requirements as well as other learnings. In this episode, Will walks through planning, learning and documenting CPD — and how this makes meeting Ahpra and other peak body audit requirements easy.
He explains the Theory of Planned Behaviour and how that relates to an innovative approach Ausmed has built, which supports behavioural change and effectiveness in learning through reflection. He also discusses how Ausmed can manage team learnings online and how they’re reimagining ongoing professional development for modern healthcare and telehealthcare providers.
Key takeaways:
- Ausmed started about 33 years ago in 1987 as a publishing house, publishing textbooks primarily for nursing midwifery. By early 2000 they started building their first ebooks, and by the late 2000s started creating multimedia content. They now run 250–300 training events per year and create 350–400 resources a year across video, audio and the written form.
- In any given month 250,000 people will use an Ausmed service, the vast majority of which are in Australia. 40% of the Ahpra registered workforce use Ausmed’s portfolio to manage and report their CPD and to discover education.
- Ausmed has a focus on delivering high-quality CPD. It’s reliable, accurate, reviewed regularly and if it’s out of date it’s unpublished so practitioners don’t spend time learning the wrong thing.
- All of Ausmed’s software to maintain a CPD portfolio is free to use. For organisations, there’s a product called ‘Ausmed for Teams’, which does all of the CPD elements and also supports the training requirements that a learning management system might normally meet around mandatory training and training against regulation frameworks.
- The Theory of Planned Behaviour says that for any action to occur somebody needs to form an intention to change. With the internet, it’s difficult as an education provider to measure whether a change in behaviour has occurred as a result of education. Most education providers can’t ever measure the impact of their learning on practice, but what they can measure is whether someone forms an intention to change practice.
- In the Theory of Planned Behaviour, three things are necessary for the emergence of the intention to change practice: (1) the perception of control; (2) whether they can make that change; and (3) they need to see social proof that other people believe this is a positive thing.
- CPD can still be claimed as education, but it’s about doing learning that improves practice. Ausmed is not built to be an easy way to tick the box, it’s built to be the throughway to effectively get the outcome of education leading to change in practice.
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