Evaluation of an online continuing professional development program aimed at meeting consultation needs of patient rights staff

The rapid change of information especially in a dynamic field like health makes it difficult for health professionals to keep up with their job related capabilities. Professional development activities which became necessity for professionals are also becoming burden on them in transportation costs, loss of work days and personal life. The flexibility of online continuing professional development offers a solution to these issues.The term of Patient Rights is relatively new in Turkey and its implementations first started in 2003. Current employees of this field are the first professionals of it and they are facing with new problems every day. Therefore they are often in need of consulting an expert about the problems they cannot solve. Considering this need, online consultation meetings were organized. 47 Patient Rights staff participated in the study. 15 meetings were researched. The expectations of the attendees, how well the expectations of the attendees were satisfied, and opinions of attendees about this online program were observed. The data of this study was collected through Likert scale surveys, open ended questions and observations.The data suggests that the expectations of the participants were met. Participants stated that these meetings were beneficial to their professional improvement and that the online environment made it much easier to communicate with other colleagues also giving them an opportunity to consult experts. It was determined that these meetings became platforms where Patient Rights issues were brought, common problems were identified, discussed and solved. 87% of the participants stated that they had used the information they learned from the meetings in their daily practice. Lack of communication in the online environment is the only negative opinion of attendees.