Our experience is very similar, Iain.
We have Medisense meters and training of at least 2 key trainers per
ward/clinical area was delivered by the company as part of the contract
- on implementation and a refresher 18 months later. They also do
bimonthly audits of ward compliance with QC etc.
However, staff turnover is huge in this large Trust, together with
short-staffing, so proper cascade training, with record-keeping as the
Trust Policy requires, has not been good. An audit I did last year
showed that only a minority of clinical areas still had a key trainer or
kept proper records of cascade training. I followed that up with some
structured interviews on attitudes to POCT and found a depressing level
of ignorance about QC and EQA (even when they complied) and the
importance of training and how it was supposed to be delivered. I've
visited some sites where staff got stroppy about having to "waste" time
doing QC and EQA and explained why - this was very effective, but too
time-consuming to do as widely as I'd like.
We do have POCT staff on each main site, but not enough to visit every
ward regularly and keep awareness high. I don't know what the solution
is - letters and emails are not the answer.
>>> Woodrow Iain <[log in to unmask]> 05/01/2006 14:50 >>>
We have noted that it has been increasingly difficult to maintain
up-to-date
training for users of our Advantage meters across the trust. Link
Nurses now
seem less interested in undertaking cascade training, and are also
becoming
increasingly difficult to recruit (another consequence of Agenda for
Change?). I should point out that we don't have a POCT Facilitator,
which is
a major hindrance.
What is the experience of other Mailbase users?
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