“I’ll miss my collection of e-learning certificates”

I’m beginning to lose count of the number of e-learning packages I have to complete every year in order for my trust to allow me to continue irradiating its patients.

There are the fire training and resuscitation ones of course, not to mention infection control and hand-washing instructions. I suppose the latter might be the first in a series of courses dealing with basic personal hygiene tasks, but there, I’m already one step ahead of them: I still have the training manual from my RAF days which offers an illustrated guide to going for a poo.

Admittedly, it was instructing us how to do it in a contaminated environment whilst wearing the all-encompassing NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) protection kit - a nerve gas attack being a situation which might reasonably give rise to the urge to defaecate. I especially relished the illustration of the squatting squaddie captioned ‘remember to reach behind and pull your braces to one side’. I liked to think it had been written by someone who had once forgotten to do this, and had spent the rest of the day banished to the corner of an airless bomb shelter, shunned by his colleagues.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, e-learning. The latest one is on ‘safeguarding’ (quite a sensible word for the process of protecting children, so I’m not sure why the term irritates me so much). Because I seldom have direct dealings with children, and always in the company of other members of the team, I only have to do the basic package. This consists of looking at five Powerpoint slides which tell me that there are bad people who do things to children, and I’m to keep my eyes open for evidence of this. So I will. Lucky they told me.

Evidence of all this online instruction ends up in my appraisal folder, an invaluable document which is designed to stop me becoming ‘another Shipman’ (and Harold trained in Leeds, so you can’t be too careful - it could be something in the water).

I do like the way you can print off your own e-learning certificates. They’re already quite impressive, but I like to embellish mine with a bit of desktop publishing - a few wreaths of vine leaves, the occasional Latin inscription, a little star at the bottom with ‘distinction’ written under it.

My folder gets bigger by the year, and I’m growing increasingly proud of it. It certainly ranks up there with the best of my creative writing and I’m almost sorry that I’ll soon be retiring. Although, I suppose that when I’m at home with my lovely wife all day, performance appraisal, if not the need for documentation, will continue (there’ll certainly be a robust feedback process, albeit less than 360 degree).

And I suppose there’s also the possibility that the NHS scheme will be extended beyond an assessment of how clean and nice we are, to include tests of medical knowledge. Yes, perhaps it is almost time to go.

Tags: E-learning