I was on the receiving end of some questionable training this month. Deciding to upskill, I booked a space on a course on airway management and medical gases with a well-known national training provider that offers many ‘Train the Trainer’ courses. I was expecting a good quality session with interesting information and plenty of hands-on practical work. The session was scheduled from 9 am to 2 pm with a short period for lunch, so a good 4 hours.
What I actually experienced was dire. I’m a Community First Responder with South Western Ambulance and have covered these topics before as we do use medical gases, so I was hoping to use this session to refresh my knowledge and top it up. The basics were there, but…
- The session lasted 90 minutes, with each of the three delegates then asked to do a short micro-teach on a subject of their choice. This was apparently to check that we could indeed teach and is compulsory for anyone delivering courses with this company – to do once per year, but was barely mentioned in the course information on the booking.
- The trainer (very experienced) simply read the notes from the PowerPoint with little explanation or motivation.
- There were a few terms on the slides which I was unfamiliar with – and when I asked what these were, he had to look them up.
- The company issues trainers with slides to use for standard courses – he was searching through one for something in particular and I noted there were over 200 slides for a 6-hour course – TWO HUNDRED! When I asked him whether he went through all of those on a one-day course, the answer was yes – but you can add more if you want to! That’s a slide every two minutes – plus all of the practical assessments, so probably less than a minute per slide. He must just read them all out!
- Equipment – he’d brought one airway head, one of each type of airway (OP, NP and nasal cannula), and two masks. The oxygen bottle was empty so he couldn’t actually demonstrate turning it on and how it worked. He showed us once how to insert the OP and NP airways, didn’t bother with the nasal cannula, and just showed us the masks. He didn’t tell us to make sure the bag was inflated on a non-rebreath mask (doing this on a casualty could kill them), and he showed us a paediatric BVM but didn’t demonstrate it.
- There was NO practical. We didn’t get to have a go – it was brought out, demo’d and put away again within 10 minutes.
- The session was finished by 12.30 pm.
Unfortunately, an utter waste of a morning and the £80 I paid.
It made me realise the quality of the learning we provide at Winterbury Training, which I often take for granted. I forget that not every trainer is good at their job, can impart knowledge and develop skills well, and instil confidence in their learners because I rarely see any training that doesn’t do this – even working with 10 centres as their quality assuror. But I was certainly reminded last week of what NOT to do, and how to celebrate what we do well!
