Latin American Teach the Teacher
Tier 1 October/November 2021
In October 2021, five IPCRG Master Teachers from Portugal, Spain and Chile came together with 20 Master Teachers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Panama. Their aim was to develop a comprehensive and scalable education programme to challenge the status quo and inertia in current asthma care and to deliver energised health professionals who want to improve the diagnosis and management of asthma in primary care.
The IPCRG Teach the Teacher© programme was chosen to bring Asthma Right Care to these countries because the process not only transfers knowledge, but also builds sustainable local capacity, using local medical educator expertise to build and adapt an educational curriculum to the learning needs and situation of local primary care.
In 2021 it was necessary to convert the programme to an online model. To help make this transition, in the summer of 2021 we held a “Tier 0” meeting. We had recognised that there was a lot of experience available in the IPCRG community that we could share to prepare our master faculties for the programme. We held an initial online workshop with experienced online educationalists to gain their ideas and recommendations and then shared his thinking with past, current and future faculty members in a further workshop.
Selecting teachers, understanding the local situation and planning the programme
We selected the Tier 1 Country Master Faculty using selection criteria that was based on both their experience and interest in teaching as well as their clinical and research backgrounds. Tier 1 masters are selected because they have a good experience of teaching because their role is to devise a curriculum and consider how they will teach the next tier of teachers. A key role of a Tier 1 country master was also that they had good networks to cascade the curriculum devised to Tier 2 and eventually to the frontline in Tier 3
A situational analysis survey was also completed by each selected delegate to inform the curriculum development and learning objectives.
Through the situational analysis we could from the 16 master from the Spanish speaking countries that over the counter purchase of SABA without prescription was common.
Tier 1 event online
We learned from our Tier Zero workshops and experience in other programmes that planning before the event is crucial and this includes networking with and between the country masters who are often meeting for the first time. We used online networking, meet the mentor sessions and also sent materials to the country masters so that they could feel and see first-hand the materials that we were also showing on screen.
The international meeting occurred over 4 sessions that each lasted half a day. During this time the IPCRG and Country Masters explored teaching principles and techniques, the components of Asthma Right Care and considered how to create a core curriculum for their country situation.
During the sessions the curricula for Tier 2 meetings were developed and then presented in the final session
Final Presentations
After the Tier 1 meeting
At the end of the course, the country masters had at least initial plans for their own programme development and a Tier 2 training programme to create a new set of teachers who can have a wider impact at Tier 3 meetings nationally, delivering a programme with the agreed clinical content. The Tier 2 meetings will happen in early 2022.
We are now embarking on a period of evaluation using an adapted model that considers the learning perspectives of an adult professional learner and will report in this in 2022 as the programmes develop.
The response to the post event survey of experience and learning has shown improvements in both knowledge and confidence levels for the learning objectives set.
We look forward to more followers to the Asthma Right Care movement in Latin America and to meeting many of our new colleagues at Malaga in May 2022.
We are grateful to Astra Zeneca for their partnership and support in delivering this programme.
Event Information
IPCRG ‘Teach the Teacher’ Workshop – Latin America – 2021 (28 October – 10 November, 2021)
Aim
To support the building of local education capacity and to develop a faculty with the knowledge, and teaching skills to deliver effective asthma workshops that are relevant to the local situation, and can be embedded in local primary care practice and pathways.
Target Audience
This project will reach frontline primary care and community health workers in 8 countries of Latin America - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Panama. The twenty Tier 1 masters from these countries will reach out to another 100 teachers in their own countries to develop a curriculum of Asthma Right Care principles and practice to support the frontline professional working with people who live with asthma.
Curriculum synopsis:
a. Assessing learning needs
b. Setting learning objectives
c. Designing a programme
d. Teaching methods including working with small groups, and distance learning
e. Assessing learning and mentoring
f. Project planning and evaluation
g. Developing a teaching module tailored to the needs of the participants
h. State of the art, treatment and follow-up of adults with asthma
i. Barriers to universal access to good quality care for adults with asthma
Objectives of the workshop
At the end of the workshop the participants will be able to:
- Assess learning needs and define learning objectives adapted to different learning environments
- Design a teaching programme on adults with asthma
- Develop teaching materials
- Know how to choose between different teaching methods
- Value the use of appropriate teaching methods in medical education
- Put together a proposal for future training events including evaluation
Workshop Faculty
- Francesc Moranta Ribas (Spain) (FMR)
- Jaime Correia de Sousa (Portugal) (JCS)
- Javiera Corbalán (Chile) (JC)
- Luis Alves (Portugal) (LA)
- Miguel Roman (Spain) (MR)