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Tell Your CHW Story at the Patient Navigator/Community Health Worker Conference

Our friends at the 6th Annual Patient Navigator/Community Health Worker Conference have announced the date for the upcoming event (May 7, 2015) and have released a call for submissions for breakout sessions. If you haven’t been to this conference, you should consider going. CHWs and navigators from all around the country come, and it’s quickly emerging as the preeminent event in the field.

Telling Our Stories: The 6th Annual Patient Navigator/Community Health Worker Conference

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Four Points Sheraton Norwood

1125 Boston-Providence Highway (Route 1), Norwood, MA

Registration will open in early spring.

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Free On-Demand Webinar: Introduction to E-Learning for AHECs

Length: 60 minutes

Everyone talks about online learning, but what does it really mean? We’ll cut through the jargon to explain the basics of health-based e-learning, and discuss why offering online courses can help you boost your enrollment numbers. We’ll identify the elements you’ll need to structure your online training program.

Watch this on-demand webinar to learn how to get the whole team on board, what the technology requirements are, and why your learners are probably asking for online module delivery. You’ll walk away with knowledge about online training that will help energize your organization and help you increase participation in your program.

View the webinar now >>

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Register for What Every AHEC Needs To Know About Online Training

CHWTraining.org is hosting a free webinar event on October 7 for any AHEC administrator hungry for information about how to expand education and enrollment through e-learning. Directors, program administrators and trainers from AHECs are invited to attend.

Introduction to E-learning: What Every AHEC Needs To Know About Online Training is complimentary and will begin at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific), during which you’ll learn:

  • How to get the whole team on board
  • What the technology requirements are
  • Why your learners are probably asking for online module delivery
  • And much more!

Space is limited for this event, so you don’t want to miss your chance to get in on the action. Please register now!

LIVE WEBINAR DETAILS:
Date: Oct. 7, 2014
Time: 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern
Length: 60 minutes

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10 Smart Ways To Help CHWs Learn Better

Following the positive response we received from our article Ways to Increase E-learning Participation among health worker professional development programs, we offer 10 more ways to help learners lock away lessons.

1. Address common reasons learners don’t retain information.

The most common reason why people don’t retain learning is they don’t finish a course. If you can find out what the underlying reasons are for dropping out, you can present your learners with an experience they can use. In most cases, withdrawals are due to family, job commitments (very common with CHWs who balance working in the field with completing a course), vacations and poor time management. Change up when and how you offer your information, and you can make it easier for students to complete.

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Register for "What Every AHEC Needs To Know About Online Training"

When: Tues., Oct. 7, 2014, 1pm ET
Length: 60 minutes

CalendarAdd to Calendar

Everyone talks about online learning, but what does it really mean? We’ll cut through the jargon to explain the basics of health-based e-learning, and discuss why offering online courses can help you boost your enrollment numbers. We’ll identify the elements you’ll need to structure your online training program.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to get the whole team on board, what the technology requirements are, and why your learners are probably asking for online module delivery. You’ll walk away with knowledge about online training that will help energize your organization and help you increase participation in your program.

Register now >>

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10 Ways To Increase Enrollment In Your New CHW Online Learning Program

Any training program needs extra effort to encourage enrollment, especially new ones. Here are 10 tips you can use to increase enrollment in your health worker training program.

Registration

1. Form partnerships with other programs and organizations

Team up with similar or complimentary programs or neighboring organizations, and ask them to co-promote the online course with you. This is very helpful for health worker training programs, where people with similar job functions are likely to work in wide range of areas. Participants can often learn from your partners while you both share strengths.

2. Remind early and often

The average person must be reminded of something 18 times before they act on it. This means you should notify participants of your new course sooner than you think and more often than you think. Look for ways to promote that include your staff’s e-mail signature and newsletters. Just keep putting the message out there.

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Is Your Organization Ready For Training CHWs Online?

Answering a handful of key questions in this readiness quiz will let you assess how well your organization will adapt to a shift to training community health workers online, and tell you where you have the most work to do to prepare.

Online training is here and a regular way of life for learners from elementary school all the way through a professional health career. Many organizations are looking to e-learning as a method of training growing workforces of CHWs, but some will find the process easier than others. Those organizations that have planned carefully for online learning and have integrated a program into its entire training strategy will advance relatively quickly, have happier learners and ultimately more successful community health programs. The most ill-prepared organizations will be the ones that find it hardest.

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Clearer Courses

The key to making better online courses is to test, revise, and test again.

My love for The New Yankee Workshop has nothing to do with cabinetmaking skills. It has more to do with the process summed up by Norm Abram’s maxim: “Measure twice, cut once.”

That phrase embodies how careful he is and how much attention he gives his projects. His carpentry skills aren’t slap-dash, second-nature. They’re methodical. He demonstrates on every show that a perfect product comes from careful planning, measuring and testing (and really good tools).

It’s not so different from creating finely crafted computer-based courses. A resonant course that keeps employees excited and helps them learn skills they’ll remember isn’t thrown together. It’s built carefully, methodically and tested.

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Excellent Video That Explains Patient Navigators

It can be difficult to explain what patient navigators do. It’s one of those times that showing is better than telling.

The video Changing Outcomes from the Massachusetts Department of Public Heath’s Patient Navigation Training program has a new video that shows what navigators do beautifully. It’s an excellent health education tool.

View, and share, whenever you need some assistance describing how public health workers operate.

Changing Outcomes from micah on Vimeo.

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Ways to Increase E-learning Participation

While there’s no quick fix for making sure your community health workers are engaged with your program, you can increase the odds by taking these steps.

Beginning any new training program can be an exercise in anxiety. Testing, piloting and review are essential steps that lead to a more successful training program, but the true test of the effectiveness of a program is when your community health workers succeed on the job.

Strategies for engagement vary widely, depending on the course and who’s taking it. And there’s no one way to make sure that your participants are actively involved. However, there are a few guidelines you can follow that will help make your CHW training stick.

Ask early and often what participants think.

A survey at the end of the course is good. Asking your health workers throughout the course how the material relates to their work is even better. Learners will often forget details by the end of a course.

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