Thomas Cochrane
University of Melbourne, Australia
Title: Enhancing Nursing and Health Care Education and Practice
Biography
Biography: Thomas Cochrane
Abstract
COVID19 has impacted healthcare education and practice in significant ways and highlighted the potential of technology to facilitate innovative new approaches to healthcare education and practice in response to social distancing, lockdowns, remote learning and improving the patient experience and positive outcomes. Many of these innovative approaches are not fundamentally new, but are now seeing relevance beyond early adopters to mainstream implementation. In this presentation I draw upon my experiences as an educational researcher and technologist of collaborating with a variety of healthcare educators exploring the integration of technology into healthcare education and practice. I highlight the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare curriculum design using a Design-Based-Research methodology to facilitate authentic learning and develop self-determined learning capabilities for healthcare professionals. Drawing upon the lessons learned from eight healthcare projects I suggest design principles for enhancing healthcare education that will improve practice in a COVID19 world. These projects include: STUDIO602 – enhancing clincial practice with mobile technologies (Cochrane & Sinfield, 2021), developing a virtual reality handover experience for healthcare students (Cochrane et al., 2018), using immersive reality to develop critical thinking in clincial health education (Stretton, Cochrane, & Narayan, 2018), enhancing first responder clincial simulation education using immersive reality and biometrics (Cochrane, Aiello, Cook, Aguayo, & Wilkinson, 2020), designing authentic learning for graduate entry nursing students (Macdiarmid, Winnington, Cochrane, & Merrick, 2021), designing public and environmental health education (Kersey et al., 2018), Biomedical engineering (Lam, Cochrane, Rajagopal, Davey, & John, 2021), and physiology education (Fabris, Rathner, Fong, & Sevigny, 2019).