Our story
Background: CardioWebinar was an initiative borne out of the suspension of face-face education during the pandemic. As we saw the success of virtual clinical activities (e.g. MDTs over Teams) we saw an opportunity to shape our own education in a meaningful way. We organised regional webinars, but through Twitter national interest grew, and with our Zoom subscription being the only limit, there were very few barriers to offering it to anyone interested in cardiac care.
At its inception in April 2020, the team consisted of Dr Vishal Luther & Dr Balrik Kailey, both full-time Cardiology SpRs in London. Since then, Dr Damanpreet Dev (Kettering) joined us to offer us greater technical expertise, and Vishal is now a Consultant Electrophysiologist working in the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital.
We have very quickly become the main team delivering Webinars in the UK, and have managed to deliver ~1 webinar a week. As of May 2021, we have produced ~60 webinars covering ~90% of the core curriculum and far more. We are very proud of the quality of the webinars, with most webinars being delivered by national leaders in their particular field. The response and feedback has been incredibly positive and rewarding, and continues to motivate us in this journey.
Collaborations and partnerships:
Very early on we collaborated with the BJCA, and they kindly hosted our webinars on their own video gallery. We have also been fortunate to obtain the support of the British Cardiovascular Society. We had also arranged a smaller partnership with the British Heart Rhythm Society delivering 5 CardioWebinars hosted on their new gallery.
Response:
As of May 2021, we have over 1600 followers on our @CardioWebinar Twitter account, and often have 100 trainees watching our Webinars live. Some of our webinar recordings have received ~1000 views. In a survey of 392 people attending in Jan-Feb 2021, our sessions were rates as “very good-excellent” by >95%.
We surveyed 145 viewers attending our webinars in March 2021 – and learned that >25% of our viewers were non trainees (nurses, physiologists, management and more), and that ~10% were from outside the UK. We believe virtual education is here to stay in a post COVID era. They are easy to organise and cheap (no travel costs or hotel fees), they offer flexible learning (especially for those LTFT, out of programme, or oncall), they are open to all members of the MDT, and to anyone across the country and abroad.
CardioWebinar.com
Pre-COVID, training days had been expensive to organise, and challenging for all to attend given clinical commitments. Our library lends itself very well to supporting virtual training days – for doctors and allied health professionals. We have organised our webinars into training days that map the cardiology curriculum. We have integrated a learning management system through which we plan to assess learning through a Q&A after each “training day” and generates a viewer certificate of attendance for appraisal. We have been piloting virtual training days in the North-West/Mersey deanery with positive feedback. We are looking to expand this for courses for the entire MDT. We are grateful to the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital for sponsoring us in developing this site.