Creating Collaboration

Challenge

Develop a knowledge resource for healthcare professionals to promote geriatric patient safety through enhanced collaboration, and to raise social awareness of geriatric health concerns.

St. Joseph’s Health Centre has been a leading provider of residential long-term care in Guelph since 1861. Faced with an ever-increasing demand for geriatric healthcare services, St. Joseph’s identified an acute need for an educational resource that would empower its care providers to:

• Optimize collaboration with other treatment professionals
• Evaluate safety concerns quickly and effectively
• Generate social awareness of geriatric health concerns
• Provide the best quality of care for geriatric patients

Solution

The Frailty E-learning Series.

This project demanded a single solution that addressed multiple challenges. We began by researching the most current understanding of the social-scientific foundations of inter-professional collaboration. We then facilitated focus groups and interviewed geriatric care experts to understand the cognitive basis of collaboration within the specific context of the geriatric care setting. Then, to ensure that the complexities of patient safety were incorporated into our research, we analyzed current data on geriatric risk factors, including falls, pain, incontinence, frailty, heart failure, addictions, medication, nutrition, dementia, delirium, and depression.

We consolidated our findings into ten distinct knowledge units and developed a series of captivating, story-driven e-learning modules that would collectively address all of the needs identified by St. Joseph’s. Known as the Frailty e-learning Series, the modules were based on client stories and delivered an emotionally compelling and interactive learning experience for staff.

Result

The Frailty E-learning Series exceeded expectations. St. Joseph’s reported that the solution provided a timely and cost-effective means of educating caregivers.

Users reported that the shared learning experience fostered collaboration, and that the client-story focus enabled a deep engagement with the content. St. Joseph’s noted that the Frailty e-learning Series was an innovative means of training a geographically dispersed workforce, and this thinking solution, for which Dialectic received a SAGE Award nomination, is now used by healthcare providers around the world.