The IPCRG education strategy

The IPCRG education strategy 2014-2020 supports learning and builds capacity in primary respiratory care.

It does so through:

1. Teaching clinical practice. This might be based on a particular theme – born out of IPCRG research or of discrete projects, such as focusing on ‘difficult-to-manage’ asthma rather than severe asthma, for example.

2. Developing teaching capacity in primary care. This includes understanding adult learning principles, assessing learning needs, setting learning and teaching objectives, and using learning design, methods and assessment such as the approach taken by WONCA in schemes in Macedonia.

3. Stimulating discussion about effective educational methods and evaluation. This involves moving beyond education to consider approaches to quality and service improvement, as well as measurement of practice, and understanding and working in health systems with ‘context appropriate interventions’.

4. Promoting leadership – capacity building through mentoring and coaching; self-awareness, building confidence, presentation skills, facilitating and influencing skills, project management.

The strategy, published in 2014, presented next steps:

• We will continue to support E-Quality as a flagship programme supporting the development of ‘bottom up’ educational or pilot projects in member countries.

• We will design a 'teach the teacher' programme template. This programme will be tailored to national or regional programmes and include identification of a work-based educational project (including pre and post course work) that then provides the material for the programme. Opportunities exist to test this template with IPCRG leading the programme in collaboration with local leaders in respiratory care (a ‘teaching faculty’) and providing the core content.

• We anticipate that ‘teach the teacher’ programmes will enable us to identify and develop a network of respiratory leaders, thus building strategic capability in member countries.

• We plan to explore the potential to develop a respiratory distance-learning module for primary health-care professionals—in partnership with higher education institutions.

• Where educational programmes exist within member countries, we will adapt our current ‘endorsement policy’ and offer an ‘education peer review’ service, based on clear criteria and with a team of education reviewers. The main difference from our current endorsement policy is that it would not be essential that IPCRG be involved in the programme development as long as it met the specified criteria.

• We will help endorsed programmes to apply for formal accreditation

• We will share best practices, narratives and case studies using the IPCRG web platform.

• We will consider what IPCRG’s role might be in disseminating information from the npjPrimary Care Respiratory Medicine to primary care colleagues who do not currently read it or have access to it. Potentially, this might be digests in translation and/or news and features adapted for local member use.

• We see advantages in exploring technology as a way to capture the key messages and teaching methods to reach wide audiences with short illustrative films that could be relabelled and used for different audiences.