Development and randomized controlled trial evaluation of E-learning trainings for professionals

BACKGROUND: Child maltreatment and consequently child protection are highly relevant and current issues in our society. Medical institutions are widely regarded as places of healing, care and support. But they also hold risk factors to promote child maltreatment. Efforts have to be taken in order to offer help to victims by medical institutions and to reduce risk factors for child maltreatment. Therefore, health professionals in the field of child protection must be trained and sensitized for these two purposes. The Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry / Psychotherapy at the University Hospital of Ulm in Germany is developing E-Learning courses directed to health professionals in order to create flexible advanced training courses for dealing with child abuse, and to increase competences in child protection. Due to their specific role in (institutional) child protection, three courses and their evaluation will be presented in this article. The aim of the studies is to examine if those online-courses are increasing knowledge and skills in child protection and how satisfied participants are with course quality. METHODS: Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) were conducted with one wait-list control group and one group participating in the course (= intervention group). The RCTs took place from October 2016 to March 2017 for two courses, and from May 2017 to September 2017 for the other course. Data were analysed with mixed design ANOVA. For evaluation of user satisfaction, descriptive statistics are reported. RESULTS: For all three courses, knowledge and practical capacities on the topic of the intervention group raised significantly in comparison to the values of the control group. Furthermore, participants of the course for managers felt better prepared to meet their responsibilities in regard to institutional child protection and came up with ideas on how to implement safeguarding standards in their institution. Overall, participants were very satisfied with the structure and the content of the courses. CONCLUSIONS: The article shows that the online-courses are an effective and well-accepted approach to train professionals in topics regarding (institutional) child protection by contributing to the participants´ abilities to create medical facilities into a place of competence and protection.