The next four months are going to be pretty exciting here at Ausmed. We’re putting the final touches on the next round of improvements to the planning tools, making it easier and faster to document CPD, and improving the reliability and design of the downloadable PDF report. We’re also introducing a new collaboration feature that lets you share documented activities with your friends or colleagues.

Enhanced Planning Tools

Since launching our original planning tools in May 2016, they have been used by less than 10% of the nurses and midwives on the Ausmed platform. This figure is much lower than what we had hoped, especially as the NMBA guidelines indicate that a learning plan is required. In July, we decided they needed a rethink. Here’s what we did…

We realised that the original tools merely provide the ‘parts’ of a learning plan. Namely they helped you define your context of practice, identify your learning objectives, and abstractly relate those learning objectives to the competency standards. In the end you were left with three different parts of a learning plan, but not the whole.

Our current planning tools give you all the parts of a learning plan, but not the learning plan itself.

Instead, we will now re-organise these individual tools as one tool designed to help you write a full learning plan in minutes. Each step will involve similar questions—we’ve improved the individual tools too—but upon completion you will be provided with a downloadable PDF summary of ‘Your Learning Plan‘.

We will now provide you with a complete learning plan that you can download and print off.

Finally, we will be removing the ability to ‘attach’ learning objectives to activities. Less than 2% of people used this feature, and many who did, described it as confusing. Instead we plan to provide you with an overall score quantifying how much of your CPD relates to your learning plan.

Overall, we hope these changes make the learning plan tool less demanding, more useful and a widely used part of the platform. Our goal is to make CPD compliance a breeze. Writing a learning plan has previously been something very few nurses and midwives have done (despite it being required), but these improvements will make it something that can be done in minutes.

Improved CPD Documentation

Over 60,000 hours of CPD have been documented on Ausmed.com in our first eight months. Roughly 70% of people who start documenting an activity, finish documenting that activity. Two thirds of the people who don’t finish documenting the activity are stopping on the activity details page of the documentation flow.

Roughly 20% of people stop documenting at this point in the documentation flow.

The details section is important as it provides us with the information we require in order for us to organise and differentiate between each documented activity.

We’re currently experimenting with better ways for us to get this detailed information without requiring you to provide it. For example, we can pull a whole lot of information about a CPD activity simply from its URL.

In this example, we are able to get information about the provider, the title, the content of the activity and an image.

You will see these improvements starting to appear over the next few months.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a new area that we’re quite excited to explore. A great deal of the education that nurses and midwives undertake is done as a group. Attending inservice, conferences and seminars are all examples of CPD that we do as a group. We want to make it easy for you to document these activities as a group too.

Initially, the collaboration feature will give you the ability to share an activity (the details, date of completion, provider, CPD hours and type of activity) with your colleague or friend. Your personal reflection, evidence and evaluation will not be shared.

By sharing all of the details of an activity, we can take people directly to the evaluation part of documenting. This saves time by removing the need to define the activity your reflecting upon first. We will also be introducing a user profile as part of these changes so that it’s clearer who you’re sharing your documentation with.

We’re also exploring the potential to share learning plans as well. This would be amazing, and particularly useful for teams. Stay tuned though, as much more will be revealed in the next few months.

That’s a wrap for now. As always, thank you for your support in these early days. We’re on a mission to make managing your CPD easy, once and for all.

Best wishes,

Will and the Ausmed team

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