Clinical Training Webinars for the Region I Family Planning Training Center

"Best training I have 'attended' in a long time!"

Federally-funded family planning providers report an increasingly difficult financial situation and get less funding to attend trainings. To face this increasing challenge, the JSI Region I Family Planning Training Center (RTC) has offered a series of clinical training webinars in order to meet their training and continuing education needs without asking them to travel.

The topics of the webinars ranged from "Genital Dermatology" to "Using New Media to Improve Communication With Your Clients." The "New Media" webinar was designed to increase the family planning providers' knowledge of and comfort with technologies such as text messaging, podcasts and social networking sites—technologies that adolescent Title X clients are using on a daily basis and which leave many of the staff in the dust.

JSI's experience reveals that distance learning can meet the needs of staff that otherwise would not be able to attend training. Using their telephone and any computer with internet access, the webinars participants were able to log on live over an extended lunch hour. The webinars were also recorded and posted to the RTC website (www.famplan.org) where providers could access them any time. Continuing Education Units (CEU) were offered for both the live and recorded version of the webinars.

The webinars were attended by over 100 family planning agency staff. Evaluation results showed that participants were extremely satisfied and that even those who initially had doubts were won over. One participant stated, "I am not comfortable with computers, but this was awesome." 93% of the participants responded that they were "more likely" to have attended the webinar than an in-person training and 99% responded that a webinar was a "convenient way" to receive training and continuing education.

Based on this positive experience, the family planning RTC hopes to continue to provide training opportunities via webinar, and to continue to explore and expand other online training and distance learning options.

Learn more about the Region I Family Planning Training Center.

For more information, please contact us.