This is an exciting time for Education at St Christopher’s with the construction of our new Learning Hub well under way! We’re really looking forward to the opportunities this building will bring, such as helping us to reach more people by using advanced technology to communicate with people around the world.

The Learning Hub really will be more than just a building. It will embody our philosophy of empowering people at the end of life by giving carers and professionals a space to review their current practices and form their own opinions about how to deliver better care.

Through the courses we run we’re not simply providing answers; good palliative care isn’t an ‘off the shelf’ model that can be applied in the same way in whatever setting. Many of our courses involve discussion and an exploration of ideas. We provide the forum and facilitate the conversations, but our main goal is to support you to find your own answers and develop an approach that works for you and your organisation.

We recognise that not everyone will be able to travel to our Learning Hub in south east London and so we use online interactive learning to connect people around the world. Our QELCA© programme, with its Train the Trainer model and St Christopher’s QELCA© Satellite Centres, is just one offering which uses online technology to connect people. They can then benefit from ongoing project support whilst leading on the delivery of high quality end of life care within their own organisations or geographical regions.

This approach also means we can reach more people and support the development of improved care around the world. In the last year, through QELCA© alone, we have worked with countries such as China, Canada, South Korea, Brazil, Romania, Guyana and Singapore to do just that.

And it’s not just distance which makes this technology vital to our learning, but the fact that it can save huge amounts of time. Time is precious for workers in the care industry and the ability to make space for training and education can often be a challenge. For that reason, we’ve developed new ways of reaching teams of staff using technology.

The ECHO initiative, promoted by Hospice UK, helps us support our local care homes by providing the opportunity to learn through group video conference calls, allowing teams to come together, share case studies and talk about the challenges they face without having to leave their place of work. Each session can be recorded so staff on different shifts can log on and watch the training at a time that is convenient for them. We’re already working with six Care Home communities, with more lined up for the coming months and we’re now offering ECHO to local District Nurses and Palliative Care Teams across our catchment area.

Our new Learning Hub will allow us to work with people from an even wider area.  Whether we welcome people from a local care home, a hospital in Wales or a hospice in Brazil, we want them to feel empowered to go back to their day to day environments, refresh their methods of care and decide how they can make improvements in the care they provide.

This is why we will use our new Learning Hub to continue to develop our education programme so we can reach more people locally, nationally and internationally and continue to share ideas and expertise to improve end of life care around the globe.