G55(P) ‘Raising awareness of child health and wellbeing needs through co-led workshops for education professionals’

This paper reports on findings from a medical training pilot event for school staff in April 2016 by the multi-professions shared practice group at Canterbury Christ Church University. The event comprised of workshops delivered jointly by health and education academics from this group. These aimed to provide basic information about different health needs and diagnosed conditions, their management, coupled with guidance on how schools could support these more effectively through closer liaison with other professions. This was stimulated from discussions following opportunities to visit each other’s areas of practice to heighten awareness of the different professions. During these visits it became apparent that education colleagues were often having to make medical decisions that were beyond their experience, with insufficient help or information. The evaluation of the event had three strands (… 2016). Between sessions workshop leaders used the familiar formula collating comments on sticky notes about ‘what went well’ and ‘even better if’. An online survey sought to ascertain participants’ role, views and impact of the sessions. Finally, co-leaders experiences of sharing facilitation of the sessions were gathered. Based on the online survey, 92% of respondents found the event to be useful and almost two thirds found the event to be very useful, indicating that there is a demand for this multi-professions approach to developing knowledge of medical conditions in educational settings. Further analysis of the mixed methods survey findings suggest that it is imperative that education professionals receive appropriate health knowledge with regards to the management and prevention of current acute and life-long conditions. Evaluations also suggest that far more attention needs to be paid to where such provision sits in relation to initial and on-going professional development, raising important questions about the scope of professional knowledge and expertise and how the overlaps into different professional settings should be conceptualised and handled.