gms | German Medical Science

Background: The German legislature states in §10 of the study and examination regulation for midwives that midwifery mentors must continuously acquire 24 hours of training per year. Colleges and universities should design and offer a low-threshold training for these midwives, which focuses on the specific needs of the mentors. Communication and effective feedback were identified as central to mentors, therefore requiring extra emphasis.

Aim: The objective is to develop a low-threshold, flexible continues education program that focuses on the specific needs of midwifery mentors.

Methods: An asynchronous online course is developed with the help of the learning platform edubreak^®. The platform makes it possible to work on tasks asynchronously, such as watching and commenting on lectures, formulating blog entries, and creating and uploading one’s own videos. Within the platform, an advanced training with a focus on communication and feedback will be conducted. After completion of the training, the participants by means of an online questionnaire will evaluate the program.

Results: One challenge will probably be the creation of the online material in order to pay justice to a comprehensive continues education offer. Enabling access to all midwives within their individual needs and options, whilst also ensuring working with the platform is as easy as possible will take good organisation. It should be noted that the online format offers flexible time management during the training and thus makes it easier for the midwives to integrate this form of training into their daily work.

Relevance: Midwifery mentors can acquire 18 hours of continues education in professional pedagogy in a period of six weeks. The options of asynchronous online continues education opens up perspectives for midwives in charge of practice development to effectively integrate their education obligation into their professional and private life. This contributes to improving the quality of practical training.

Conclusion: Asynchronous online offers are well suited to support midwifery mentors as part of their continuing education requirement. This is important to support the practice stakeholders in their mission to ensure qualified, competent personnel for the supervision of student midwives in practice education.

Ethics and conflicts of interest: A vote on ethics was not necessary. The research was financed by own resources. There are no conflicts of interest.