Health Action Training courses to be offered to the Nursing Now Challenge network
This blog was written by Karl Tizzard-Kleister, co-founder of Health Action Training
Hello, I am Karl Tizzard-Kleister, co-founder of Health Action Training (or HAT for short) and it’s a pleasure to be able to bring you some exciting news!
We are thrilled to announce that thanks to funding from the Burdett Trust for Nursing, we are able to begin an ambitious multi-year partnership with our friends at the Nursing Now Challenge to deliver our innovative training to nurses and midwives around the world. We are so grateful to say that thanks to the Burdett Trust for Nursing we are able to offer this training at no cost to members of the Nursing Now Challenge network.
Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you a bit about us at HAT…
HAT, a revolution in communication training
HAT is a training company specialised in communications training for nurses and midwives. Our courses are accredited by the Royal College of Nursing, the Continuing Professional Development standards offices, and the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland.
Over 95% of participants of HAT courses strongly agree that they provide a positive learning experience and so many comment that our approach to communication training is game-changing. Participants come away from our course more prepared to deal with stress, to lead on solving problems, and to embrace perceived failures as learning opportunities.
We’re dedicated to evaluating the HAT courses, and in doing so we have discovered that they have benefits beyond enhancing communication. We use validated tools to objectively measure outcomes from the training. For example, in one course we achieved a 15.4% increase in resilience scores on the internationally recognised Connor-Davidson Scale (CD-RISC, Connor & Davidson, 2003), and an increase of 11.76% in the Person-Centred Practice Index (PCPI, Slater, McCance & McCormack, 2017; for more on this project, see Jennings et al, 2021).
A group of colleagues and I founded HAT in May 2020 after more than eight years of developing, researching, and delivering communication training to hundreds of student nurses in Northern Ireland (Jennings¸ Deeny & Tizzard-Kleister, 2020). Our unique training approach blends actor training with applied drama methods into communications training and role-play simulation for nurses and midwives. As a company, we believe that developing effective communication skills requires conscious attention, experience, and practice. Our courses use approaches from drama to enliven communications training and give participants practical experience in applying the techniques they learn.
A training methodology based on your context
All of our courses are bespoke to the needs of the people and organisations we are working with. The methods we use, like Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre (Boal, 1998), remain the same, but the topics and contexts change. For example, we have recently worked with groups of nurses whose main role is telephone triage, so we adapted our course to focus on the main communication issues and needs arising from that – like managing the lack of visual cues, dealing with third party calls, or responding to distress. Similarly, we have adapted our courses to include content for contexts like hospice care, breaking bad news, dementia care and more. We are committed to sharing our approach far and wide and have developed a train the trainer approach to do this. Our aim is to give trainers the tools and ongoing support to develop courses specific to their colleague’s needs, all following the HAT approach.
Our partnership with the Nursing Now Challenge
We have partnered with the Nursing Now Challenge in order to build on these achievements and share the benefits of this training with as many nurses and midwives as possible. With the support of the Nursing Now Challenge, and funding from the Burdett Trust for Nursing, we are ready to start training trainers to achieve our long-term goal of developing a global network of trainers who can in turn teach others using the HAT approach. This ‘each one teaches one’ approach is crucial to the potential impact and legacy of this project. Our goal is to train and support HAT trainers to adapt HAT methods to their local context, tailoring culturally-sensitive programmes that address the specific challenges in communication and care faced by their colleagues and communities.
It’s my deepest hope that with the continued support of the Nursing Now Challenge network, HAT company mentors, and our global community of peers, we can share our approach with people to become HAT trainers who are able to continue to support the development of the global nursing and midwifery community for many years to come.
To learn more about HAT, click here
Download a presentation about HAT here
To register your interest in taking part in a HAT course, click here
References
Boal, A. 1998, Theatre of the Oppressed, Pluto Press: London.
Connor, K., & Davidson, J. 2003, ‘Development of a new resilience scale: the Connor-Davidson resilience scale (CD-RISC)’ in Depression and anxiety, vol 4, no. 2, pp. 76-82.
Slater, P., McCance, T. & McCormack, B. 2017, ‘The development and testing of the Person-centred Practice Inventory (PCPI-S)’, in International Journal for Quality in Health Care, vol 29, no.4, pp. 541-547.
