Forming a committee for Clinical Facilitators/ Education in 2013

I am a Clinical Facilitator (CF) for the last couple of years in a Dublin Hospital. I found when talking to my fellow colleagues/friends who are also CF/Education that there is such a huge variance and responsibilities in our roles. We felt that we needed to come together and share/support each other in similar projects. For example, I am working in isolation on a particular projects (trying to re invent the wheel) and subsequently found out that another CF had gone through the same process, crazy! By forming a committee it would give us recognition and support we need in the clinical areas – never mind the financial implications.

Getting together as a body by sharing each other’s experiences and forming a network would be amazing.  It took Deirdre O’Kelly and Lorraine Kennedy from the Mater Private Hospital(well done) to call a meeting to discuss the formation of a committee for Clinical Facilitators/Education. At that meeting last April 2013, there was a strong consensus that a formalised group may assist with a greater recognition of the facilitator/education role. We planned to take the following steps in order to formalise the group. A joint chair person was I and Deirdre 0’Kelly (Mater Private Hospital).The elected secretary was Lorraine Kennedy (Mater Private Hospital).

We suggested for a  representatives from each hospital in Ireland would be the ideal situation. We acknowledged that there had in the past been a previous Clinical Facilitator group. However, it did not appear to have been any meetings in the past few years. We are also aware that there are many other facilitators out there that we may not have been able to contact as the e-mail list we had was not a current and up to date list. I contacted Cora Mc Crystal Education Dept Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland. She gave me a link to contact fellow colleagues in our role. http://www.nursingboard.ie/en/professional_practice.aspx  I was able to get some contacts to spread the word about our cause. Another suggestion is to, in the near future, to advertise the group in the INMO magazine to highlight the importance of our role to our CNM colleagues and hospital management.

We had our second committee meeting in Tallagh Hospital on the 22^nd May last. It was suggested that we would have greater attendance at our meeting if we were part of a subgroup.  The Practice Development group hold yearly conferences, that maybe the Facilitator/Education Group could be part of it. What is needed now is, to submit a requesting letter to the practice development committee along with ‘our terms of reference’.  At this stage we have given ourselves till the 20^th June for the feedback on the draft ‘Terms of reference’. Once that is completed we move to the next stage ........