General Surgeons Australia

Healthcare
eWorks General Surgeons Australia Case Study with four surgeons in operating theatre

Background

GSA (General Surgeons Australia) is a not-for-profit organisation with two main arms:

  • A membership society for general surgeons in Australia
  • Administration of the general surgery education and training program in Australia.

Our members include:

  • Trainees and junior doctors interested in a career in general surgery.
  • Internationally trained doctors who are gaining their surgical qualifications in Australia.
  • Fully qualified General Surgeons.

Challenge

The high failure rate of trainees
Before implementing the online learning program, there was a high failure rate for the hurdle examination.

The narrow focus of the legacy exam
The legacy exam didn’t address the full breadth of the curriculum that the experts (surgeons who developed this program) felt that trainees in their first two years of training should be covering.

Data & Reporting
Previously, our client manually extracted all the statistics for the questions in the question banks. This resulted in an increased workload for their team.

Solution

eWorks developed bespoke content for General Surgeons Australia.

The online learning modules were developed as an assessment tool, and a hurdle requirement that replaced the exam.

The bespoke content comprises eight learning modules, each containing online content, formative assessment tasks, and a summative assessment. Content covered includes core general surgery topics, with the modules mandatory for all general surgery trainees to complete within their first two years of training.

eWorks also created a customised report solution to solve the issue of having to manually extract the question bank statistics, saving GSA valuable time.

Benefits of LMS and Bespoke Content for GSA

Better Knowledge Testing – The content is a very practical online learning tool. It covers a greater depth of the curriculum and the practical, day-to-day aspects of surgery.

Reporting – Thanks to the built-in detailed, sharable reports and charts and graphs offered by a Learning Management System, GSA can monitor and track their trainees' learning progress. The LMS has significantly improved the data sets available to GSA, which has enabled them to produce statistics for Standard Setting exercises for the assessment components.

Time Savings - Another issue was that pulled statistics didn’t appear in a usable format. The conversion required multiple steps, including copying from a Word document to transposing the data into a spreadsheet. The LMS has now enabled a single export, and the GSA team can easily transpose data from one spreadsheet to another.

Bulk Enrolments – Previously, the GSA team had a difficult time enrolling linked and non-linked users in the course modules. eWorks created a solution that allowed bulk enrolment via a CSV file containing each course code. As a result, 1500 people were enrolled in the correct courses within minutes.