Learning Hubs for Continuous Professional Development
Dr Muna Abdel Aziz
Director of Public Health for Salford Manchester, UK
SUSTAINABILITY (4): Recent developments in research and teaching towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
World Association for Sustainable Development (WASD)
Online International Conference
Wednesday 14th February 2024 (10:00 – 13:00 UK Time)
Full Details: https://wasd.org.uk/listing/sustainability-4/
It’s my pleasure to join you today and U really looking at the new approaches to teaching and research in public health for sustainable development and Prof Alam mentioned a series of courses that we are undertaking uh one of which is um learning helps for continuing professional development and this is the
One I wanted to start with just to describe a way an approach where we can assemble lots of knowledge intelligence insight and experiences in a very short space of time to help push forward our leadership and to push forward our impact towards developing towards delivering our contribution to the
Sustainable development goals and I suppose that if we are really um confident about our system leadership about our personal leadership and so on that we have to continuously work on that and develop it and move forward both individually as teams and also as a system so learning hubs are an approach
That we have been using in our Public Health Training Program here in the UK and um I I have been really uh fortunate to lead um a group around uh training program director for uh cheser and Mery side which is in the northwest of England and the learning hubs now have developed a
Legacy of their own where trainees and trainers will come together to talk about the work that they’re doing sh learn and share from each other and then subsequently reflect on it for their continuing professional development and since um 2020 and during the pandemic to date I’ve been the director of Public
Health for sford um so I’ve taken the learning hubs approach out of the training territory and put it learning as part of our teams as part of the way we work in creating what we call a thinking environment and a thinking environment you’ll see that that is a
Registered trademark for uh really an influential thinker uh of her times Nancy kleene who produced the book about listening to IGN to ignite the human mind and she actually said that if you take time to think and to think deeply you will discover new con connections
And you will also unblock your SE your thinking in areas that you have been stuck on and what better stuck area have we been looking at other than the Millennium development goals and now the sustainable development goals so my pitch to the audience today and for attendees and delegates who will join
Some of these courses that are run at the moment by uh Queen Mary’s University uh and being run um sort of maybe in Saudi Arabia also online is how can we create a thinking environment for ourselves not just for training and that course will enable people to think about okay then how much
Time they’re spending and effort and energy that they’re spending both at work and at home in terms of achieving that balance for continuing development for their own careers and then also thinking about how do we document our Reflections and how do we improve our services through annual cycles of
Sometimes it’s management work and sometimes it’s continuing professional development work but you can’t do this on your own so if you’re interested to develop yourself personally you have to develop your team with you you have to develop your partners otherwise it will be a sum negative if you work together
As teams and across systems and put in place these reflective practice and quality improvement efforts then there would sum total will be more than the sum of the parts so that is the first course and maybe I’ll just um highlight some of these learning objectives for
That first course and it will run over maybe 5 to eight hours it can take longer and actually from that starting point you can take away those tools and techniques and develop your own action learning sets in your own environments wherever you are in the world so the basis for learning an
Experiential learning is this very early C cycle which has been improved and modified but in it’s just most basic form it’s about taking our experiences to date and not just your own experience but the system experiences to date you reflect on that you create the time to think through for example an Active
Learning active listening uh action learning sets and then you take away those actions the change that you want to see happen and that will improve your experience and then it will again you know continue on that experiential learning cycle many um teachers you know in whether you’re in teaching or whether
You’re training for myself training medical colleagues training non-medical Public Health multi-disciplinary clinical teams training uh system Partners in economics in um not just in health in education and so on you’ll be familiar with this cycle but maybe you have not reflected on it uh yet and so joining that course would be hugely
Beneficial because you would be bringing your experience as other people will bring their own so I I’ll move on to another aspect then why are we thinking and learning why are we spending so much time energy effort um even money in the spaces in which we work it’s because we
Want to improve our leadership we want to make an impact we want to leave a legacy so how can we use the experiential learning cycle towards delivering our sustainable development goals and so you’ll have a an approach that is called leadership tools and techniques for public health people from
The public health if you’ve been public health trained you will be familiar with these tools but other stakeholders in your systems may not be as familiar so this um this training will enable you you to reflect on your own leadership but also for your partners to join you
On such a leadership uh development uh opportunity and for them to reflect on their system leadership as well so with the higher purpose of delivering sustainable development goals what does public health have to tell us public health for sustainable development and so um this um training or this uh
Development opportunity allows you to reflect on both your strengths and your development areas it allows you to use tools like logical planning like strategic planning transformational shifts quality improvement and one of the really key ones is stakeholder analysis because I don’t think we do enough of that we don’t put ourselves in
The shoes of our partners we don’t put ourselves in the shoes of our service users and of course I should mention root cause analysis for things that go wrong and many of us will have our near Miss records our incident registers our invest vations but the root cause
Analysis is a way in which you can arrive at why something happened what are all the contributory factors that led to that incident of course there are other things that we need to do if we are going to deliver the sustainable development goals we should be tracking our work on tackling Health inequalities
We should be thinking ahead of the unintended consequences of our decisions so if you’re interested in looking at that and you know really challenging yourself challenging your assumptions and challenging the system risks I think this is a development opportunity that you would benefit from yourself and your
Teams and then how does that apply to specific area like women’s health for example and this is a another attempt to reach a different audience of for example um working in the maternal health field working in the child health sphere uh early in unal sphere and we know there are specific uh Millennium
Development goals that were around maternal mortality and infant mortality and that they’ve uh we weren’t able to really achieve those in isolation what we need and the world and UNICEF and all of our world Partners West are telling us is that you can only achieve the sustainable development goals if you
Work to collaboratively in a multi-disciplinary way so how can we use a Learning Hub approach and Leadership skills tools and techniques to apply them to women’s reproductive health of course we can apply the same to Ed education for women you can apply the same for youth Championship there are many aspects of multi-disciplinary
Working that will fulfill the sustainable development goals so just one of the first examples we’ve applied this work to is in women’s reproductive Health trying to chart our experience from the Millennium development goals can we think of that can we reflect on that can we act on it and execute a
Change so in this development opportunity for people who are interested in women’s reproductive health or also interested in men’s reproductive health or the role of husbands in women’s reproductive health and the role of grandparents and the role of parents in women’s reproductive Health then this is a development
Opportunity for you and the way we um approach this is by putting ourselves in their shoes when you assess what different partners want to achieve you find yourself that you’re pushing offers to women and their families take up Family Planning why haven’t you taken up family planning you know take up our um
Antinal care why haven’t you taken up our antinal care and we keep getting stuck on these really uh hard issues but they become easier when you put yourself in their shoes and you understand that the reason why antinal care hasn’t featured so much is because is because the early detection of pregnancy wasn’t
In place so by using root cause analysis in this sphere you’ll ask yourself the questions the five wise why are women not attending why is pregnancy not detected uh early and then you take that back why are uh you find that one of the contributors is that why are women not
Using Family Planning so by using the five Y in this development opportunity and using the stakeholder analysis you’ll be able to tackle some dilemmas that have faced us for some time around fertility and infertility some new emerging issues around the menopause and recognition of the menopause in our
Workplaces and then looking at how do we deliver safe women’s health clinics in the clinic setting so this is an open offer really where we have uh an experiential learning cycle what did we experience and learn from the Millennium development goals and we reflect and
Create the time to think and new ways of working sustainable development goals and I I’m quite happy to take questions on these particular um development opportunities I’m also happy to take question questions on the tools and techniques that will be explored in those development opportunities so I
I’ll leave it there and uh I I’ll hand over to profam thank you very Much so please remember if we all help and do a little bit it will make a big Difference