EBME Forums Forums Management Training Trust approved training

Hi,

I am the Senior Medical Equipment Co-ordinator for the Royal Oldham Hospital Site's Equipment Library. I am not a clinician or technician, actually am admin and clerical graded; but do have some involvement in user training and general equipment advice.

I would like some formalised certificates or competency documents that are approved to allow me to do more in depth training. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Kerry

Kerry.Ingham@pat.nhs.uk
0161-778-5418

I think the only safe way to undertake training is if you are aproved by the company who makes the equipment. This means you should have the same product training as their reps / clinical trainers (depending on who they use to do their training) - which would be quite a task if you have lots of different pieces of equipment in the library !
We've had a few "key people" trained as trainers by companies such as Graseby and Alaris and they now act as advisors for people who need help setting equipment up. Despite that, we still organise regular training sessions for any clinical staff who wish to attend (or are nominated by senior staff) which are run by the company clinical trainers, so the training isn't just cascaded down - it's done first hand.
There is no point doing staff training if you don't have a proper competency based system with proper evaluation in place. The trainer and the staff being trained have to sign-off their competency and the document kept on file. If you haven't got a written record of the training being done and the competency being assessed, then you might as well not bother because it's meaningless if there is an incident.

Hi Kerry.
Competecy based training is quite an issue at the moment with many of the government organisations.
This is one topic that is being discussed at a meeting in Hatfield on the 1st July (there are quite a few people who visit this web site attending this meeting).
Hopefully we may start addressing approaches to a national generic framework which would be transferable between trusts.
If you are free on the 1st July, contact me to reserve a place (the meeting is free kindly sponsered by Datex Ohmeda)
Look forward to hearing from you or anyone else.