Modern Compliance Training in Action

What you’ll read:

• How AllenComm worked with one client meet their unique compliance training challenges
• Effective compliance training
  • Emphasizes human impact
  • Provides authentic practice scenarios
  • Offers opportunities for self reflection

With allegations of workplace harassment dominating the news cycle, AllenComm recently took a closer look at how compliance training helps prevent workplace issues. Several of our colleagues wrote thoughtful pieces illustrating crucial considerations of this ongoing discussion, explaining that the most effective compliance training should emphasize human impact in addition to legal issues, provide authentic practice scenarios for deeper understanding, and offer opportunities for self-reflection.

Now that we’ve laid this groundwork, it’s time to dive a little deeper. Let’s talk about how we incorporated these important aspects of compliance training into courses we created.

Compliance training in action: The scoop on PRI

Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers (PRI) sought to provide the physicians they insure with training in patient safety risk management practices to diminish potential malpractice risk and improve the quality of patient care. However, physicians are very busy, so the training had to be compelling and effective enough to make it worth the seat time.

Emphasize human impact

To really reach learners, compliance training must acknowledge how the audience thinks and why they might prefer to handle situations in ways that stray outside of the preferred response. Compliance training also needs to cause the learner to care about the outcome of their actions—something that is most effectively done by showing the cost of an undesirable behavior. Whenever possible, the costs shown should be in terms of human impact, not legal or financial issues.

In line with this, rather than frame the training through the negative consequences of malpractice lawsuits, the PRI courses focus on changing organizational culture surrounding malpractice. Throughout the courses, learners read case studies where they see how a physician’s actions affect their patients. These case studies stoke empathy in learners and help them see the humanistic side of avoiding malpractice risk.

Provide authentic practice scenarios

Without authentic practice scenarios, it’s hard to create the kind of context that allows learners to transfer what they learned in the training to real life. In fact, if the practice isn’t sufficiently realistic, learners may not absorb much learning at all. “Learners know their work environment. They know if you’re way off on a situation they’d face, then they won’t trust the lesson you’re trying to teach,” explains AllenComm performance consultant Kelsy Mortensen.

PRI and AllenComm worked together to gather details that made each scenario authentic. Having each scenario be based on real-life cases “gave us detail, complexity, and authenticity that resonated with our learners,” says Mortensen. Because of this careful curation of information, throughout the courses, learners practice responding appropriately to various patient cases that credibly “illustrate the consequences of lapses in clinical reasoning, physician burnout, and lack of patient and family inclusion.”

Offer opportunities for self-reflection

Our new Core Reflection Tool emphasizes self-reflection about interpersonal awareness and empathy. Being instructed to consider their own impact on others helps the learners better understood why their behaviors may need to change. In this similar vein, the PRI compliance courses offer learners intermittent opportunities to participate in polls and construct responses to critical thinking questions.

Reflection is a key part of applying the principles learned in the PRI courses, notes Mortensen, “At the end of the day, the learner has to be able to apply the training to their practice or it wasn’t worth their time.” The polls and reflection pieces help learners internalize the new behavior and figure out how it applies to their specific medical practice.

Going forward

As compliance training continues to evolve in response to workplace issues, we plan to incorporate more and more human impact emphasis, authentic practice scenarios, and self-reflection. These principles are the future of modern compliance training, and they will help compliance training finally achieve the results it historically has been unable to reach.

Reach out if you have a specific corporate training need. We’d love to connect with you.

On tap next week: How to identify industry specific compliance training needs.