Active Learning in Infectious Disease Education - Let's Think about My 5 Moments! -

Abstract

Conventional lecture-style education is usually delivered for healthcare workers in hospitals. However, this is passive learning and can accomplish limited teaching efficiency. In this report, we describe the details of our activities to incorporate active learning techniques at a regular infection prevention seminar in our hospital, which successfully resulted in a high-level of satisfaction from the participants. This study was conducted in May and June 2021 among the employees of the Marugame Medical Center. As a preliminary task, they were asked to develop "My 5 Moments," which was defined as situations that they frequently encounter in their daily work and perform hand hygiene. They then made a presentation of their ideas at the seminar. We evaluated the changes in the implementation of hand hygiene among nurses working in wards before and after the seminar. Furthermore, we conducted a questionnaire survey to evaluate the effectiveness of this participatory workshop. Of the 391 employees, 365 (93.4%) participated in the seminar, and 231 (66.8%) worked on the pre-assignments in each occupational group. Various "My 5 Moments" were presented by each occupational group, which provided a good opportunity to reacquaint us with the daily work of individuals in other professions. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test demonstrated that the number of hand hygiene among the nurses significantly increased after the seminar (median: 14.2 times/day vs 20.0 times/day; p = 0.007). In the post-workshop questionnaire, we received valid responses from 356 participants (91.0%). Compared with the lecture-style education, the participatory education was favored by 74.5% of the participants, with 26.8% reporting it was "very good" and 47.7% reporting it was "good." This study demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating an active learning technique into a regular infection prevention seminar. The generalizability and long-term impact of this approach should be evaluated in future studies.