Continuous Professional Development to Support People with Diabetes: The Perspective of UK General Practice Nurses.
Creators: name: Walsh, Nicki
Publisher: name: University of Lincoln
Year: 2023

description: Healthcare provision can never stand still; it is therefore essential to ensure provision reflects the relentlessness of scientific advancement, changes within the health profiles of populations and meeting individual expectations. Society’s changing health and social care requirements determine that systems must be flexible enough to accommodate these changes but also additional implications of an ageing population with increasingly complex health needs (Oliver et al, 2014, OfS 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2023), these have been accentuated by the purported system failures and fragilities exposed by the recent COVID19 Pandemic.This thesis will consider the educational requirements of those working in healthcare, determined to be vital for safe and effective care. The focus will be on “so-called” Long-Term Condition (LTC) of Diabetes. This specific condition was selected due to the meteoric rise in the number of people being diagnosed with the condition (IDF, 2022 and DUK, 2019) alongside the author’s previous work in the field of diabetes healthcare professional education (see Chapter One). The focus will be specifically on Continuous Professional Development (CPD) further developing the work by Simmons et al, (2015) and Walsh (2011) who challenged the quality of education as part of a task and finish group with Diabetes UK; concurring that the necessary consistency and quality of healthcare professional (HPC) education had been neglected.This thesis explores research acquired by using a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) approach which sought to identify the challenges of CPD from the individual perspectives of ten nurses working in UK General Practice (GPNs). GPNs were selected as the vanguards for diabetes management, alongside purported workforce challenges being faced, with GPNs leaving due to retirement or dissatisfaction with working conditions (Lauder, 2022).This thesis’ propositions that with this exodus, the acquire and required knowledge for effective management of diabetes will dissipate leading to what the author has defined as a “knowledge haemorrhage”.By using a CGT approach this research has explored with the participants or as Charmaz (2014, p15) states “the actors” their reflections on their acquisition of CPD from the perspective of their professional practice and development, but also from an educational perspective by reflecting on their learning styles and delivery approaches they have experienced. Charmaz (2014, p6) advocates this methodology’s utility when attempting to discover the reality of a phenomenon within a social context as is sought here.Results found that there were many inconsistencies in educational opportunities for GPNs. For example, inequity in access and funding for education; variability in the type of CPD i.e., formal courses and informal courses; quality of education and suitability of curricula for learning styles and practice requirements, alongside issues of poor leadership and lack of career framework. From the data it became apparent there were implicit themes which have been defined as clinical isolation, through a lack of clinical connectivity all of which can compound CPD opportunities, alongside a lack of consideration of individual learning styles and needs which related to the concept of heutagogy.