We interviewed Trisha Coady, VP, Clinical Staff Development at HealthStream, about the importance of lifelong
learning in healthcare and what HealthStream is doing to help our customers make it a priority for their clinical staff.
Why do you think lifelong learning is so important for healthcare staff?
The concept of lifelong learning is particularly important in
healthcare for a number of reasons. First, lifelong learning
was one of eight recommendations in the IOM report
(IOM, 2010) stating, “Significant barriers must be
overcome if the shortage of nurses is going to be offset
and more advanced and expanded nursing roles are going
to be filled. Having enough nurses with the right kinds of
skills will contribute to the overall safety and quality of a
transformed health care system.”
What are some of the problems that focusing on lifelong learning could help solve?
Healthcare evolves very rapidly, and it’s simply not
reasonable to expect that leaders could identify learning
gaps in each and every employee in a timely fashion.
Creating a culture of self-directed learning and providing
access to information empowers our direct care providers
to make more confident, informed decisions at the
bedside. Also, engagement of most healthcare
professionals is lower than the average US workforce,
with turnover costing billions of dollars annually in an
environment with significant margin pressure. Nearly one
in four nurses (24%) are currently actively disengaged,
compared to only 16% of the U.S. working population
(http://www.gallup.com/poll/6004/nurses-may-satisfied-
they-engaged.aspx). Deploying creative opportunities for
new or reinforced learning, as well as motivating creativity
among staff has never been more paramount.
How could lifelong learning benefit patients and outcomes?
Nearly 70% of the healthcare workforce is in some way
involved in direct patient care. That’s 3.1M of
HealthStream’s 4.5M subscribers as an example, and they
complete over 1M courses each week. If each of those
healthcare professionals could prevent harm or death for
only 5 people in their lifetime as a result of their acquired
knowledge, over 15 million lives would be saved.
Establishing and nurturing a culture of lifelong learning
inherently promotes employee engagement. “Using
standardized mortality and complication indexes, from
more than 200 hospitals and including staffing and other
variables such as nurse engagement, showed a significant
relationship between engagement and outcomes,”
(Blizzard, 2005).
How would you advise healthcare learning managers to incorporate and promote a
stronger focus on learning?
If we reflect on our own career progression, there are
decisions we make after 20 years of experience that are
drastically different than what we would have made in
our first year out of college. To amass that experience
and level of critical thinking, we’ve likely pursued formal
education or courseware, attended conferences,
volunteered on committees, leveraged peers and
mentors, etc. Did your own manager force all of these
activities upon you or did you seek these out? If the
opportunity was presented to you, were you more likely
to participate? My guess is that most have an intrinsic
desire to seek some level of learning and certainly are
more likely to participate if opportunities are presented.
There will always be a need for mandatory, regulatory or
focused training, but I also believe it’s just as critical to
offer opportunities for self-development.
How does continuing education relate to lifelong learning?
Continuing education is often thought of as a sister to
lifelong learning and defined by the Alliance for Continuing
Education in Health Professions as, “the process by which
health professionals keep up to date with the latest
knowledge and advances in health care. Substantial
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literature exists indicating that continuing education (CE)
in the health professions is effective in improving
healthcare, patient outcomes and population health.”
(ACEHP)