Digital media is way to deliver health training

If you’ve travelled recently on a plane, you may have noticed a shifting trend in terms of the inflight safety training videos shown. It seems many airlines are moving towards animés as a means of capturing passengers’ engagement in a better way for the content they wish to pass.

Aviation is perhaps one of the most rigorous of operational fields around safety and change theories: nothing happens or is adjusted without evidence or extensive analysis. Why this sudden shift and style and what can we in healthcare adopt from it? An aviation colleague says the change arose after it was noted passengers scored poorly on retention of desired safety points even amongst frequent fliers.

For doctors, particularly those working in a human resource constrained environment, the vast amount of material required to practice is astounding.

Pretty often one is the paediatrician, surgeon, gynaecologist etcetera all in one. As the medical armamentarium keeps widening and evolving, to remain up to date, you have to be constantly hitting your “refresher” button. New evidence and scientific breakthroughs are happening rapidly.

However, increasingly busy workplaces and distracting life environments, necessitate adoption of novel models of new knowledge delivery. Traditionally books, journals, workshops and conferences have been the avenues for delivering this to doctors. The challenge is how to do so with shrinking time and busy commutes.

Across the globe, this is now changing however. Digital media is certainly the new preferred consumption model not just for news, entertainment or information, but also medical material. Books may still be kings, but digital media is the heir apparent and a significant number of health workers are pursuing this alternative.

This is informing part of a growing movement of medical educators aligned towards how we train and educate the millennial generation of the health workforce away from libraries. In a nutshell, if it is not engaging, forget about its future acceptance.

Surveyed data

A global non-profit’s recently released a report citing local surveyed data which suggests that what is now needed is knowledge delivery to health workers. Skills upgrade and knowledge retention emerged as crucial areas for health systems strengthening.

Even as a health worker, you are likely to be spending more time on your phone, computer than with a book. Digital media’s two strong features are its consumption modes: “on the go” and “shareable”. Kenyans spend on average two hours on social media daily (cumulative time a smartphone user without bundles issues).

The latter feature now means you share interesting media quickly electronically. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Whatsapp are all interesting avenues for educative medical material and learning collaboratively. Do books fight or integrate into these new channels?

Subscription journals dwindling fortunes and lack the new features of consuming and easy sharing of juicy media have quickly moved to digital platforms. How do we collaboratively deliver knowledge to millennial medics?