TRAINING THE WORK-FORCE - MODELS FOR EFFECTIVE EDUCATION IN INFECTION-CONTROL

The education of hospital staff for infection control is really a form of adult education in which there are two important priorities: to te ach what the student wants to know and to deliver knowledge that the s tudent can use. Techniques developed in the industrial and commercial fields can be adapted to deal with these issues in the hospital. A 'to tal quality management' customer survey for infection control was cond ucted to identify services that are considered helpful by hospital sta ff and to identify topics that they want to know about. A 'task analys is' was carried out to determine the tasks performed by different cate gories of staff, because an education programme that focuses on tasks the staff performed, will be delivering knowledge that they can use. F inally, a scheme for identifying strategic areas for education, when a guideline is implemented, is described.