Chair File: Sharing Learnings to Enhance Patient Care
COVID-19 is a pandemic with no precedent, and certainly no equal. In many ways, we’ve been learning as we go. For health care professionals, this has elevated the importance of peer-to-peer sharing as never before.
This means more than just soliciting a second opinion about a patient. Care providers are very interested in — and have a lot to gain by — exchanging knowledge, experiences, insights, successful protocols and ideas for managing the current COVID-19 landscape and planning for what health care will look like in the post-COVID-19 world.
It’s an ongoing national dialogue well worth having. But in our current period of resources — human and otherwise — that are taxed to the limit, it can be difficult to connect with peers to have these enriching conversations.
The AHA Living Learning Network is a new platform that can help fill this gap. By joining, members enter a digital community designed for health care professionals to share pressing COVID-19-related needs, as well as helpful tools and resources to promote just-in-time learning and training. In this community, members can examine key operational and management priorities, and share questions and experiences with subject matter experts, thought leaders and colleagues across the nation.
The AHA Center for Health Innovation offers a multitude of collaborative learning and transformation opportunities, including the Living Learning Network, in which the curriculum is designed by AHA members for AHA members. Another Center offering, the Innovation Collaborative, regularly convenes a cohort of leading organizations to share best practices and solve common challenges. This has proven very useful to my own organization, Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, Mo.
The AHA Living Learning Network is encouraging health care professionals to sign up and join the conversation.
So, why should you participate? A chief nursing officer from Spokane, Wash., offers this thought: “The AHA Living Learning Network gives me the opportunity to reach out to my colleagues from across the field quickly and easily to better understand and manage a situation by looking at it from different experiences and perspectives. It opens our minds to new possibilities and it helps us build trust.”
This is ongoing medical education at its finest; practitioners spreading best practices for the benefit of patients. Please take a look at the Living Learning Network. You probably have something valuable to share and gain.