With the United States Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, an uptick in state attacks on birth control, and misinformation and dangerous rhetoric spreading about contraception, it’s more important than ever to ensure healthcare centers have accurate information to provide their patients seeking information about their birth control options.
Our CME/CEU-eligible training is an informative and fun blended-learning training event that includes e-learning modules, videos, live workshops, and an in-depth practicum. Training attendees have consistently left our trainings feeling more knowledgeable about all of the various forms of contraception.
In October of 2020, we shared a blog post recapping our journey to transform our in-person trainings to the virtual space. At the time, we touted early results of how virtual training was performing. Our virtual training was only a few months old. As a nation, we were just beginning to get used to our new reality and as we looked to schooling, which had also gone virtual at the time, we were unsure if we’d achieve the same impact.
In that same post, we shared how we had looked across 24 in-person and virtual training sessions and found comparable increases in knowledge scores. I’m excited to share that we continued to monitor that data and can confirm, once again, that virtual training works. This time our success is captured in the journal Contraception.
We included survey data from in-person trainings that took place between 2019 and March 2020 and virtual trainings that took place between June and January 2021. The data showed that the results of our virtual training was comparable to the results of the in-person training with both clinicians and support staff.
Holyoke Health Center was our first healthcare center in Massachusetts to participate in our virtual training. Before the pandemic began, they had partially completed our in-person training.
“The Upstream training program was the first time our clinic restructured our operations to accommodate a training during working hours. The first half of our staff really enjoyed their training in-person. When we needed to pivot to the virtual training, we were a bit skeptical about how it would go. Would it still be as engaging? Would we still learn as much? But our staff and clinicians adapted to the new model seamlessly and enjoyed working with the trainers,” said Glorimar Irizarry, Women’s Health Program Lead.
When you compare Holyoke’s response to what they liked most about the training, you’ll find that the two experiences generated similar responses.
Feedback from our partners continually informs improvements to our training model. We’re proud to be able to take their feedback and continue to strengthen our program and the people who help make our mission a reality, our healthcare center partners.
If you’re interested in reading the study in Contraception, it’s available here. If you are interested in partnering with Upstream, please contact us at info@upstream.org.
