Nadine Seymour

Paramedic

South Africa

Doctorate Title: Distance Learning as a Means of Delivering Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Care Education Across Namibia.

Doctorate Description: Abstract

BACKGROUND: Pre-hospital emergency care education has been presented in the same way since its inception; in some regard, education in general has been delivered the same way for over 800 years (1). Medical training programmes such as paramedicine, nursing, or that of medical doctors are traditionally offered via face-to-face didactic classes at stipulated class times. Today’s students have many roles to play, they are not necessarily just students but are also in some cases parents and bread-winners and therefore unable to leave their homestead to move closer to a University and complete full-time studies. Just as students have changed, so must educational methods and strategies. It is hypothesized that pre-hospital emergency medical care training can be offered via a distance learning method, using a variety of learning tools to provide pre-hospital emergency medical care education to those individuals wanting a career in paramedicine or those wanting to upgrade their qualifications, without having to be on site.

AIM: To investigate the application of distance learning as a delivery method of pre-hospital emergency care education in Namibia.

METHOD: This study will be conducted in 4 sequential parts. These parts are set out as follows: Part 1: analysing the acceptability of distance learning as a method of providing pre-hospital emergency care education via a qualitative study; Part 2: Conducting a realist review to evaluate and analyse current emergency care distance learning models; Part 3: Utilise rapid prototyping to develop a distance learning pre-hospital emergency care module; and Part 4: Conduct a pre- and post-course evaluation after pilot delivery of the developed pre-hospital emergency care module to determine its acceptability.

ETHICS: Ethics approval was sought through the University’s HREC (HREC163/2019) as well as permission obtained to conduct this research from the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), and the Namibian Emergency Care Practitioners Association (NECPA). Approval was also sought and obtained from the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MoHSS) as well as the National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST). Search terms:

Distance learning/education; Paramedic training; Pre-hospital education via distance learning; Online learning; Blended learning.