The development of a taxonomy of components for healthcare professional training interventions

BackgroundTraining is a key intervention for ensuring evidence-based practice becomes standard practice, but evidence for what constitutes effective healthcare professional training is lacking. In a systematic review we identified inadequate descriptions of training interventions in publications, which has hindered understanding of what aspects of training lead to improvements or changes in knowledge, skills and behaviours of healthcare professionals. AimsTo develop a taxonomy of training intervention components to improve the design, reporting and evaluation of healthcare professional training. MethodsTwo qualitative studies exploring the perceived effectiveness of healthcare professional training and a systematic review of training interventions to improve the management of psychological distress in primary care were used to inform the content of the taxonomy. Intervention components identified as effective by health professionals and experts in training/behaviour change formed the initial taxonomy. The taxonomy was then mapped onto intervention components reported in studies identified in our earlier systematic review and additional components were included.ResultsA total of 171 training intervention components were identfied. These were arranged into 11 hierarchical groupings and divided into three phases of training (pre-training, training delivery and post-training) to form the Training Intervention Components (TIC) taxonomy ConclusionsThis research underpinned the development of an evidence-based taxonomy to inform the design and reporting of healthcare professional training with the ultimate aim of improving the scientific quality of reporting, evaluation and implementation of training interventions. This quest is crucial to help implement evidence based practice. Additional multi-disciplinary research is needed to further refine the taxonomy.