RA Course Report 24th March 2012

Relaxing on a beautiful spring day at home in Newbury following our 29th RA course, it is time to reflect and check the feedback.

This time the one-day course was held in our new education suite and so everything was different for us and in truth, only just ready in time with plumbing still going on the day before.  

We decided to use both rooms with one set up for the interactive, didactic teaching 

and the other with a massage bed , doubling as a dental chair, for the practical demonstrations, using a mobile stand for the equipment.

I must say that on reflection, although this arrangement did work and allowed us to demonstrate the technique very nicely, talking it over with Chris, we feel that using my treatment room with a bona fide dental chair and our neat, fixed installation, is probably more akin to what delegates would be used to.  In that respect, as well as others, it differentiates our offering from that which SAAD are able to provide.

So for future courses, we will revert to using my treatment room for the practical demonstrations, including the one with a patient, which will still be patched through to the new seminar room via a-v links.

For me, one of the highlights of these demonstrations is when I offer the patient the opportunity to speak unscripted to the delegates . They only have a few seconds to say yes or no and invariably ( so far) accept the invitation.

This allows the patient to say how they felt about the experience immediately afterwards and also for the delegates to fully appreciate both the effectiveness of technique and just how rapidly the patient recovers and how lucid they are within, a few minutes of " switching off" the nitrous
oxide.

Feedback Results

We had 9 delegates. 6 dentists and 3 dental nurses.
3 dentists from different practices in Ireland and 2 from Leeds with 2 of their dental nurses.
None of these have used sedation or have seen patients treated under conscious sedation.
Finally, 1 GDP and his nurse from Hereford, who is experienced in IV sedation and had tried but gave up on RA some years ago.

Of the 9, 5 chose to give additional comments: Here they are, warts and all, in no particular order.
 

1) "The course was very informative, interesting and fun. Looking forward to practicing it"
 

2) "Thank you very much for an extremely informative day"
 

3) Please do not use yellow or light colour on the slides which are to be printed as it doesn't show up"
( My sincere apologies to any delegate whose handout was unclear, we did have some printing issues beforehand and I will of course be sending better copies to any delegate who requires it)
 

4) "Really enjoyable course. Enjoyed both the theoretical part and the hands-on element. Dr. Charon makes RA seem very straightforward. Chris and the other nurses were very kind also.
 

5) I was very impressed with what I felt was a unique course, small group size and 'special interest' experience from Richard, Chris and the team. I would and shall gladly recommend to colleagues interested in R.A.

Feedback scores:

Venue Excellent, 2: v .good 7 (Need to improve central heating. Too cool at the start and a tad warm by the end of the day)
Relevance: Excellent 8, v. Good 1
Audio-Visual: Excellent 5, v. Good 4 ( a fair reflection. We had a couple of minor glitches)
Speaker: Excellent:8 v. Good 1

So room for improvement on the audiovisuals. A few of the 490 slides to be edited. I'll be seeking further clarity on this from the delegates.

Summative assessment results

 All delegates completed a short MCQ by way of a summative assessment of the day's teaching.

7 delegates scored 83%
1 delegate scored 91%
1 delegate scored 100%

So all in all a pretty successful day's learning and vCPD and very helpful feedback too.

The next course is on May 12th, in Newbury. There has been much interest already. Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis, so if you are interested, please e-mail me (richard@the-ra-coach.co.) to request more information for course No. 30 in the series.

and finally via e-mail:

" Hi Richard

I just want to thank you, Chris and the rest of your team for a great course last Saturday. It was hugely informative and has greatly increased my confidence and enthusiasm for using RA.

Kind regards 

Lotte"