Your haematology training opportunities
Dr Deepti Radia [pictured below, left hand side] and Dr Vishal Jayakar [pictured below, right hand side], King’s Health Partners Haematology education and training leads, tell us about their latest education and training opportunities available for staff in May and also later on in the year.
Dr Radia and Dr Jayakar, please describe your roles within King’s Health Partners Haematology.
Vishal: I am lead for commercial education and training at King’s Health Partners Haematology. I started the role in 2018. With my outward facing role, I engage with external stakeholders at a national and international level through events and training to increase the visibility of the Institute in terms of its educational initiatives.
Deepti: I am also lead for education and training within King’s Health Partners Haematology, however my role focuses on the clinical angle of training opportunities. With all the different specialty areas within King’s Health Partners Haematology, my role helps to enable multi-professional teaching to take place across the Institute.
Tell us about the latest education and training opportunities in May.
The journey of the full blood count
Deepti: The King’s Health Partners Learning Hub has 10 courses available on haematology, but one I would like to draw particular attention to is the “journey of the full blood count”. This resource is suitable for anybody working in a clinical setting, as the emphasis of the module is the journey of the full blood count from the patient to the lab, to the clinician. It does not matter what profession you work in – it will be applicable to your everyday patient care.
King’s Health Partners Primary Care Webinar series on haematology
Deepti: On 19 May I will be presenting at King’s Health Partners Primary Care Webinar. One area of our remit as an education and training group is linking in with the local population and primary care colleagues to support them with haematology specific education and training opportunities. In the webinar we will be discussing an introduction GP advice/liaison with haematology touch on Consultant Connect, an initiative designed to support GPs connect to rapid treatment advice via phone. Make sure you register your place to hear about these areas of haematology and the support available to primary care and plans around the haematology network.
Preceptorships
Deepti: The preceptorships are interactive and immersive training experiences in a haematology specialty. There are several to choose from thanks to the range of expertise with have within King’s Health Partners Haematology. Over the past year, Vishal has worked incredibly hard on making our preceptorships a ‘blended’ learning experience – aiming to make it as close as possible to the experience of onsite face-to-face training.
Vishal: That is right, our preceptorships are focused, crisp educational modules dedicated to a particular niche topic in haematology. These are two-three-day training constructs that involve not only interactive/immersive teaching in a haematology sub-specialty, but also the opportunity to interact with some of our leading clinicians with international renown, by observing their clinical practices first-hand. We run an annual preceptorship programme with 6 events executed in 2019 (Pre-pandemic) and 7 scheduled for 2021. These are subscribed from delegates nationally and internationally including Europe, UAE, India, China and South East Asia.
Vishal: Adapting to the virtual space in the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been able to continue to allow participants to make inroads in our clinical and research areas by observing experts working in their fields as part of their training. For example, we film senior scientists in laboratories demonstrating assays and experiments, or specialist nurses in units conducting apheresis etc. to demonstrate how specialist teams may work with things like CAR T-cells, a type of novel immunotherapy, or sickle cell disease, an inherited red blood cell disorder. The filming is streamed during the preceptorships, as if you were there in real life, backed up by polling questions, quizzes and interactive Q&As.
Vishal: We have now also started staging and filming multi-disciplinary teams working together as part of the preceptorships. We bring around eight people from different disciplines together to cross-pollinate clinical ideas, film it and stream it during the preceptorship sessions, bringing in the cumulative expertise personalised to clinical vignettes. These are just some of the ways we have tried to stage what we would have normally achieved through face-to-face teaching in a virtual setting. There are currently a few spaces for King’s Health Partners staff to attend our preceptorship on CAR T-cells – take a look at the links below for more information. These preceptorships take place bi-yearly, so if you are not able to join this month, stay tuned for details of other preceptorships later in the year.
Sickle Cell Preceptorship taking place 17-18 May.
CAR-T Preceptorship taking place 24-25 May.
Infections of the Immunocompromised Preceptorship taking place 4-5 February 2022.
Postgraduate Certificate (PG Cert) in Haematology
Vishal: The PG Cert in Haematology is due to start in September 2021 and is actively recruiting. We were delighted to launch it as the only course of its kind in the UK. It is a 60-credit module: 30 credits are completed in a virtual setting on general modules such as research technology and the other 30-credits in haematology take place on-campus over 12 weeks on different haematology specialties. It is a structured module taking place across King’s Health Partners sites, rotating through all sub-specialties of Haematology. For example, you may spend a couple of the 12 weeks looking at haemophilia, a week in the transfusion laboratory and some weeks exploring sickle cell disease.
You can also listen to Prof Anne Greenough and I talking about the new PG Cert in Haematology and how to apply on the King’s College London website.
What is the benefit of staff completing these courses?
Vishal: Most of our preceptorships have clinical vignettes - patient-related cases and scenarios used for educational value. For example, the sickle cell preceptorship, takes you through the journey of a mother and child (Daniel and Denise) and their health experiences, ensuring the training is humanized and taught with a patient centered focus. There is also the benefit of receiving CPD points when completing these courses.
Vishal: More than anything else, because with the preceptorship you are delving into subspecialty, you get an A-Z on everything you need to learn in that specialty. On an international level, we have a lot of interest from aspirational organisations setting up their own haematology programmes. One example might be setting up a programme on CAR T-cells. By completing the preceptorship, what they learn is not only about patient selection and management, but also the governance, inspection and the operational elements behind setting up a service like this one. The preceptorship gives you the holistic package of all these elements, amalgamated in to one.
Vishal: We know that medicine is an imperfect science and that there can be two right answers for one problem. A lot of what we do is about navigating around these sticky clinical impasses by getting experts on a topic (in a virtual space) to debate a question for which there could be many solutions. One of the things we take great pride in is discussing topics which are controversial and non-binary and to try and brainstorm ideas and come up with pragmatic-personalised patient plans.