At Leeds Libraries for Health partnership ten of us deliver a joint training programme. We each have our own ways of training people and we wanted to explore this so that we could learn from each other. We chose to start by looking at how we teach searching the healthcare databases (HDAS) as this is something we all teach and there were some concepts that we wanted to look at different ways of teaching (e.g. the thesaurus).
We got together on Thursday 21st March 2019 for a couple of hours to share what works for us when doing healthcare databases training. The aims and objectives of the session were:

Aim: to share what works for us when we do HDAS training so we could learn from one another.

Learning objectives:
• Work through the HDAS training materials
• Share resources we use
• Think about how we can give people the best learning experience
• Be open to discussing how we each deliver training to learn from each other

The focus was to see if we could deliver training better, what we can learn from each other, and how to give delegates the best learning experience.

On the day we worked through the two guides used in the HDAS training (a locally created Creating a Search Strategy guide, and the NICE-produced guide) to talk about how we individually approach the elements of an HDAS training session, either for 1:1 training or groups. We also made sure there would be plenty of cake!

Trainers who used their own training materials shared them with the group.

We started by working through the training materials step-by-step and highlighting the parts we wanted help to refresh or where we wanted to try something different to our usual methods. It was really useful to discuss the different ways of explaining concepts such as PICO, Boolean logic, and the thesaurus. By the end of the session it felt like we had more tools to make people’s learning experiences more valuable. There were tips (did you know there was a HDAS quick guide? Most of us didn’t!) and alternatives to use instead of the tried-and-tested (but not always helpful) methods, such as alternatives to PICO that had been found to work well.

It was extremely positive that all who took part were open to sharing, and asking for, ideas with the rest of the trainers. This is something we could do again in the future for other courses, and I would recommend it as a learning process and an opportunity to learn from your peers.

Heather Steele
Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust