Introduction: The Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA) leads the Australian Government’s national program to save and the lives of more Australians through organ and tissue donation for transplantation. The OTA, with the DonateLife Agencies offers specialised professional training, information and resources for healthcare workers involved in donation and transplantation. The OTA has recently implemented the DonateLife WebCoaching program for donation specialists. The program provides a unique web-based professional development opportunity for donation specialists to receive real time feedback from an experienced coach in a safe, supportive online environment. Sessions involve a role play of a Family Donation Conversation scenario followed by a debrief with the coach and a video of the role play that the participant can review and reflect after the coaching session.
Method: We evaluated participant feedback from the first 79 coaching sessions via an online anonymously submitted survey.
Results: The participants were 79 Donation Specialist Nurses, and 2 different scenarios were utilised. Two webcoaches conducted all of the 79 sessions, 48 sessions by coach 1 and 31 sessions by coach 2. 92 % of participants strongly agreed that the content of the training was appropriate, and 77% strongly agreed the time allocated for the session was appropriate. 88% of participants strongly agreed that they were satisfied with training. Further free text comments and feedback were also provided by the participants around potential areas for improvement, whether there were any IT issues, and what did and didn’t work for them (and why) in regard to the overall experience of the webcoaching session. In particular the free text comments highlighted the most highly valued element of the training is the honest, constructive and timely feedback and the discussion that occurs while watching the recorded simulation in real time.
Conclusion: Webcoaching is feasible in our setting and positively evaluated by participants. This online mode of simulation training was able to be implemented successfully and will be further expanded and modified based on the needs of participants and the wider donation and transplantation sector. The OTA operates across 8 states and territories with substantial geographic and timezone challenges. This form of simulation training offers the ability for coaches and participants to join a secure, supportive and safe online environment and share in a learning opportunity from wherever they are, even across a distance of 4000 kilometres.