SYNOPSIS

The primary goal of today’s presentation is to identify potential barriers to learning that will help us plan the orientation of 2015’s new trainees, not only in anaesthesia but in other craft groups. The secondary goal is to compare the vastly differing results Peter obtained when he initially undertook this project as an online survey with the results obtained when the study was repeated as a qualitative research project, and to consider that the way we ask a question might influence the answers we get.

SPEAKER

Dr Peter Howe first came to RCH in 1989, planning to be a paediatrician, but found he spent most of his time performing painful procedures on children and gave up not only paediatrics but medicine for a while. After trying out life as an unemployed actor in Darwin and an unemployed opera singer in Melbourne, he returned to RCH as an anaesthetic registrar in 1997 and hasn’t left since. He has been an anaesthetics consultant since 2000, the supervisor of anaesthesia training since 2001 and an Honorary Clinical Senior Fellow with The University of Melbourne since 2006.

He has always had a passion for teaching, and has been the RCH anaesthesia department’s ’Teacher of the Year’ seven times. Earlier this year he completed a Master of Clinical Education through Flinders University. Today he will present aspects of his masters research project, which describes the experiences of anaesthesia trainees as they began a term at a specialist paediatric hospital.