Online and Blended Learning Courses for Healthcare Professionals and Policymakers on Patients’ Perspectives on Medicine: A Project Report

Abstract

In order for healthcare professionals to better engage with patients, they need to understand and integrate the perspectives of patients into their daily work. In this project, we developed two courses for healthcare professionals on patients’ perspectives on medicine. One course was an online course that introduced the patients’ perspectives on medicine and explained its importance for healthcare and health policy. The second course was a blended learning course, consisting of online modules and face-to-face webinars, which specified how to explore patients’ perspectives in qualitative interviews, and how to develop implementation plans. Patients participated in the development, execution, and evaluation of both courses. Overall, more than 2000 healthcare professionals enrolled in the first course and, in just over a year, 191 participants completed the online course; 57 healthcare professionals registered in the second blended learning course and six participants completed both components of the course. The relevance of knowledge gained was positively evaluated. Participants especially appreciated the participation of patients. Based on the feedback, the second blended learning course was adapted to run online and both courses continue to be freely available to all interested healthcare professionals on the Coursera platform.

Changing Times: The Impact of Digitalization on the Behavior of Professionals and Their Perception towards Development

“…In their studies, 88% of the respondents considered that online courses are not sufficient for their professional training. Again, we are considering here the fact that these differences are coming from students (even if they are in their last years) because a study by [15] also shows similar results to ours. In this study on healthcare professionals, half of the respondents were extremely satisfied with the online courses.…”

“…However, there are studies that focus on professionals in which the results are similar to ours [15]. In the case of the research by [15], half of the respondents considered these courses to be "extremely efficient". The fundamental reason why all of the studies have opposite results is their focus on university education.…”

“…Moreover, when looking at the preferred type of event we notice that most of the respondents choose online events-such as webinars and case studies. The same results are shared by studies focusing on professionals [15,16].…”

“…When assessing the overall quality of the programs, most of the literature that we analyzed presents different results than our study [1,3,7,8,12] with dissatisfaction ranging from 88% in the case of [14] to 5% in the case of [8]. However, there are studies that focus on professionals in which the results are similar to ours [15]. In the case of the research by [15], half of the respondents considered these courses to be "extremely efficient".…”

“…The reference [15] researched the impact of online and blended courses for healthcare professionals. The results of their study show that half of the participants were extremely satisfied with the content.…”