Assessing Referrals to a Trauma and Orthopaedic Department: Evaluation of a Traffic Light System for Virtual Fracture Clinic in the Emergency Department and Urgent Care.

Background The Trauma and Orthopaedic (T&O) on-call service receives referrals from the emergency department (ED), general practice (GP) and urgent treatment centres (UTCs) and requests for inpatient reviews. The virtual fracture clinic (VFC) pathway allows ED and UTC clinicians to assess, discharge and refer when necessary. For VFC, the on-call orthopaedic consultant reviews the cases the next working day and makes an appropriate plan. This pathway consists of a traffic light system, in which practitioners can either safely discharge with written advice (green), refer to the VFC (yellow) or refer to the on-call team (red). Method The aim of this study was to assess how the VFC pathway was being utilised. All referrals to the T&O on-call team over three weeks were evaluated retrospectively. The following referrals were excluded: fractured femur, head injury, trauma calls and back pain pathway. The following data were collected: patient details, diagnosis, referral source, reason for referral, plan, double booking with VFC and appropriateness. Results A total of 191 referrals were analysed. Most referrals are from the ED (51%) and UTC (23%). Of the referrals, 39% were deemed to be inappropriate. Of the inappropriate referrals, 35% should have been referred directly to the VFC rather than the on-call team. A significant minority (7%) of inappropriate referrals were referred to the on-call team and VFC. Conclusion Education and collaboration are required with the ED and UTC to ensure the proper use of the VFC pathway. Immediate radiograph reporting may also be beneficial.

Assessment of Virtual Peer Learning by Peer Feedback: A Pilot Project.

Introduction Virtual learning has become the preferred modality for health education during and after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Peer learning is gaining a lot of significance lately and has been successfully tested in various settings. We combined virtual delivery of health education with peer-assisted learning and evaluated the effectiveness using peer-generated feedback and tested the effectiveness of the model for different cohorts. Methods We performed this study as part of a formal educational course on Health Professions Education. The educators were volunteers from different informal multi-disciplinary groups, working in varied healthcare settings, globally. This involved eight teaching sessions which were delivered virtually and the feedback was recorded as responses to six items (questions), which the learners graded on the Likert scale. The average for each item and the larger domains was then calculated and analyzed.  Results The feedback was provided by all the participants (53/53). In the feedback received item-wise, the best average rating was for legibility of the slides (4.8). The least rating was for adequate checking and assessment of prior knowledge (4.2). In terms of the broader domains, the best feedback was for the teaching material (4.6) and the lowest was for the planning of the sessions (4.4). Overall, the ratings for the domains and the items were above 3 on a scale of 1-5. Conclusions Virtual delivery of healthcare education, facilitated by peer-assisted learning, is an effective model for health education when delivered for a small group, as evidenced by the overall peer feedback. This model can be tested for larger cohorts in the future.