Looking back, 2024 was a good year for the Journal. We have received high quality manuscript submissions and published research which will hopefully make a difference to our health care system.
According to CanMEDS 2000, patient advocacy is an essential part of competencies. The ISBAR format is a well-tested and evidence-based communication framework for health professionals. We all know social determinants are a key part of health, wellness and illness. Links and colleagues have trialed ISBAR+ for communication to improve individual patient care in this regard.
The impact of polypharmacy on morbidity and mortality is well known. Tapley and colleagues’ pragmatic study highlighted the need for ongoing long-term multi-component educational programs to address the barriers to GPs and GP registrars deprescribing potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs), as the timeframe of their educational program was too short to measure its effect on practice change. Jordan Tait and colleagues argued more should be done to identify effective strategies to promote appropriate benzodiazepine prescribing among GP registrars, as their pragmatic non-randomised study found no statistically significant reduction in benzodiazepine prescribing after a multi-component educational intervention underpinned by the Behaviour Change Wheel framework.
Online learning is time efficient and most of us depend on this format to improve knowledge. In their meta-analysis, Anna Joy and colleagues explored whether this knowledge is translated into practice, suggesting that more can be done to facilitate this process.
Tailoring online learning using clinical data (electronic medical record (EMR) data), according to the pilot study by Janssen et al, can be effective for early career medical practitioners in cancer care, as this made learning closely align with their clinical practice. Michelle Upvall et al demonstrated how online volunteering, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, could be a feasible approach for building teaching and research capacity globally.
We have healthcare gaps in rural areas in Australia and attracting health care practitioners to deliver care in these areas is often triggered by good quality education. In their paper, Adams and Yen suggest some novel approaches in this field. A good example of rural health care gap is in paediatric palliative care, where Angela Delaney and colleagues have described a pop-up model for this to close this gap.
We need more knowledge in health care and taking part in research is one of the ways in which health professionals can contribute to this scholarship. The attitude of physiotherapy students on research was explored by Peter Stubbs and colleagues. They concluded that we need more in-depth quality analysis to explore this issue.
Health care professionals need good quality sleep to provide optimal care. O'Callahan et al explored how involving medical imaging students in the study of their own sleep patterns, beliefs, and experiences fostered better sleep habits, underscoring the importance of comprehensive sleep education programs that enhance self-efficacy and leverage social learning opportunities.
“Soft skills” are hard to teach and assess. It is well known we spend considerable resources on falls and most of the fallers are older multimorbid patients. Teaching empathy by virtual reality is feasible according to the paper from Asif et al.
We should provide person-centred care by multi-disciplinary teams. Bentley and Kerr used findings from Tasmanian research projects conducted over the past decade to tailor and deliver a model that uses the clinical training space as a way of promoting multidisciplinary general practice.
Caring for trauma patients is a special field. Nurses who manage these patients need targeted education. Such a program can improve their knowledge and confidence according to Watkins et al.
I want to thank my team for their hard work in 2024. We hope HEPJ’s new continuous publication model is making an impact by disseminating knowledge to educate health professionals in providing evidence-based interventions to promote better health and wellness of our population.
A special thank you to all the reviewers that have been instrumental in making 2024 a great year for our journal. We really appreciate the support we received from the health profession education research community.
We will continue to strive in providing a high-quality journal, that is free of charge to authors and readers, and to people that are interested in understanding the impact of education in health.
1 For correspondence: Prof Kichu Nair, Director – Educational Research, Health Education & Training Institute (HETI), Locked Bag 2030, St Leonards NSW 1590, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
1 For correspondence: Prof Kichu Nair, Director - Educational Research, Health Education & Training Institute (HETI), Locked Bag 2030, St Leonards NSW 1590, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
Health Education in Practice: Journal of Research for Professional Learning, vol 7, no 1, 2024