Stage One
Preparation: What do we want to achieve and what’s in it for me?
- Align training objectives with organisational goals – identify learning outcomes in terms of new behaviours, attitudes, and knowledge for staff as well as for teams/services;
- Link training objectives to specific organisational goals and values
- Make this link visible – show that the training matters (Anderson 94; Brannick and Levine 02; Brown 02,; Salas et al 2009; Crawford-Docherty 13)
- Provide organisational support for the training initiative – obtain practical and symbolic commitment and ensure that all stakeholders are on board with the initiative (senior leaders and managers)
- Demonstrate that support and commitment to line managers, staff and service users eg through new/amended policies
- Determine required resources and time commitment for the project and ensure their availability, including trainees having adequate time to participate in training and engage with post-training consolidation processes (Goldstein and Ford 02; Greenhalgh et al 04; Salas et al 08, 09; Kirwan 09; Crawford-Docherty 13)
- Get frontline clinical leaders on board – find one frontline clinical leader who is committed to and enthusiastic about the initiative;
- Provide positive reinforcement (verbal praise and public recognition) for that commitment - lead by example; always show don’t just tell.
- Engage clinicians, clinical leaders and line managers as early as possible in conversations to promote commitment and participation
- Hold clinicians and managers accountable for achieving training goals through setting of realistic change targets and means by which to monitor progress against them (Rouiller and Goldstein 93; Tannenbaum and Yukl 92; Greenhalgh et al 04; Kirwan 09; Salas et al 09; Crawford-Docherty 13)
- Prepare environment and trainees for training – set right expectations (eg provide relevant information about training, myth-bust) before training to demonstrate value to clinician, service and service user, communicate what it is and is not; ensure clinicians brings service users in mind to training
- Develop training course and materials collaboratively with trainers, managers and clinicians to reflect local context of work eg local language, team configurations, means of staff release etc
- Select trainers based on expertise and ‘lived professional experience’ of teams from which trainees will be selected, ideally reflecting all disciplines from which trainees will be selected
- Design skills practice and supervision as well as applied theory into training delivery
- Design ‘transfer tasks’ for use during and after the training course eg assessed case studies of skills in practice
- Make required changes to clinical records infrastructures eg codes on electronic records for new interventions, sections in records for new forms used with service users (eg thought diary sheets for CBT)
- Make required changes to management and supervision structures eg allocate clinical staff to clinical supervisor to consolidate skills during and after training, add training transfer to operational management agendas, set appraisal goals,
- Develop and set in place audit systems for monitoring transfer into practice (eg audit entries in care records and careplans), so enabling demonstration of accountability
- Select appropriate staff for training – start with most motivated and committed as they will become ambassadors for the training within their teams
- Develop training contract, agreed between trainee and manager as to what new contribution the clinician will make as result of training and what support the manager will provide to enable this (Cannon-Bowers et al 98; Rall, Manser and Howard 00; Greenhalgh et al 04; Meyer et al 06; Kirwan 09; Salas et al 09; Crawford-Docherty 13)
