Remote and Rural CPD research

`31/05/2018

At the CPD Connect showcase day in Stirling last year we were challenged to consider the CPD service that is available to remote and rural (R’n’R) communities. It made us think about how CPD is undertaken in R’n’R areas in Scotland and of how little we know of what CPD activity there is for primary care teams. In addition, we were unsure of what CPD was done in an inter-professional and collective sense, rather than by clinicians on their own.

We performed a literature search and found little that mentioned modern educational practice that was relevant for these communities and so we decided to develop a research project. Our main aims are to identify what CPD resources and methods are being used and what practitioners would want in the future. We thought that focusing on the Western Isles and Northern Isles (NHS Shetland and NHS Orkney) would be a useful case study and that we would use a Grounded Theory approach to data collection.

We are visiting Stornoway in September this year to meet with as many people as we can in the one day who are practitioners in the town. We plan to visit the two practices in Stornoway and interview community and primary care pharmacists and primary care nurses too. We want to do visits to other practices in Lewis and Harris and include North and South Uist, Benbecula and Barra. This may take some time to complete before we turn our attention to Orkney and Shetland.

There are three of us in the research team: Vicki Waqa, our new nursing advisor and until recently an advanced nurse practitioner in NHS Lothian, Leon Zlotos a pharmacist within NES and David Cunningham who is a GP and operational lead of CPD Connect. We will keep you posted about our progress.

David Cunningham