The education café: A novel model to provide specialist perioperative continuing professional development during theatre downtime

Recent healthcare staff industrial action disrupted operating theatres activity, delaying procedures, and increasing waiting lists due to cancellations. Strike days have also led to inadvertent idling of theatre practitioners during decreased activity. To maximise paid staff working time during down-times, the Theatres Education Team devised the Education Café for self-directed online specialist continuing professional development activities compiled into menus of QR codes. These could be scanned by theatre staff allocated to theatres with cancelled lists, with their own devices, to learn within their own pace in a contained area with clinical practice facilitators supervising completion and reflective work after each continuing professional development activity. A total of 4936 continuing professional development hours were garnered by staff, with a mean of 206 continuing professional development hours per industrial action day. In financial terms, the department saved £185,593.60 which would otherwise have been needed to fund continuing professional development programmes and study day backfill in regular times, when continuing professional development in the education café was not provided. Staff feedback provided high scores for the activity with a mean of 4.84/5.00. The team that undertook this project received the 2024 AfPP Perioperative Team of the Year Award, and this report meets the requirement of the award to disseminate the project via the AfPP journal.