Back in March I blogged about an e-learning course that I developed for Victoria Hospice on Pediatric Palliative Care and now I’m pleased to share another e-learning course that I’ve recently completed, also for Victoria Hospice.

Putting the Palliative Performance Scale (PPSv2) into Practice is a short e-learning course for health care professionals to teach them how to use the Palliative Performance Scale, a tool that people can use to talk about a patient’s palliative care condition. Victoria Hospice developed it in 1986 and it is now used in many healthcare settings. It’s a measurement tool of performance status in palliative care.

The course features a nurse-like character who welcomes the learner to working together on the Palliative Care Unit. Throughout the course the nurse and the learner learn about the Palliative Performance Scale and visit patients together to assess their condition using the scale.

This course features some simple interactions such as this slider-based historical timeline:

And this drag and drop interaction to help the learner discover who can use the PPS. (Big hint: It’s all of them!):

An exciting element in the course is an animation that we built (with thanks to my amazing subcontractor Karyn Lemberg) to show how to use the PPSv2 (one part of which is shown in a static shot here):

I also love that we built clickable Palliative Performance Scales so that the learner can “assess” patients a couple of times – based on scenarios that we give them – using the scale.

Here’s a short video that shows you how it works:

We scaffold the participant’s learning by talking about how the scale is used, showing them an example of how to assess a patient using the scale, and then asking them to assess patients using the scale. They can assess one patient to try it out (for no marks), and then they assess another patient for marks counted towards their completion certificate.

This quiz interaction also counts toward that course completion certificate:

This self-directed module takes approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. It is now available for registration through Victoria Hospice if you know anyone in healthcare or palliative care who may benefit from taking it. Wishing the great folks at Victoria Hospice much success with this e-learning module!