Learning bites are educational snippets that take 10-15 minutes, traditionally placed at the beginning of our Emergency Department morning shift after we have taken handover from the night team.
We firmly believe in the value of this educational tool, as it fulfills two important roles: 1) It reinforces the idea of our commitment to being an excellent teaching department. 2) It helps to consolidate the idea of teamwork within the department.
One of the methods that we use is crosswords.
We divide the morning team into groups of 2 to 3 clinicians trying to be as equitable as possible in allocating a mix of senior & junior colleagues.
In our experience, a 15 words crossword is enough to make it challenging, but not too challenging to complete in 10 minutes. As they work in teams, we can see how this promotes discussion and peer learning.
With plenty of online tools at hand creating a Crossword is not as daunting as it may sound. All you need is to provide the questions & answers to the crossword creators.
I personally like this one: https://worksheets.theteacherscorner.net/make-your-own/crossword/
It is free and it limits the number of characters in the clues. I used to find coming up with appropriate clues within the word limit of 15 as well as keeping it interesting a bit of a struggle initially.
I now used one of 2 strategies for the crossword learning bites and I name them as either a “thematic day” or “manageable sizes”.
Thematic days: it is as simple as it sounds, pick up a theme, and find 15 words related to it.
It can be a single specialty, a topic of particular interest to you, or any other variables! Your imagination is the limit.
A few examples that I have used are 'Mnemonic day', 'Trauma day' etc. Single specialty can be a tricky one, as you may find that too many questions from the same topic may disengage some of the participants.
Manageable size: I tend to divide the clues into 5 groups with 3 clues each. Then I find 3 words for each group. I tend to include pediatrics as a group in all of my Crosswords, as I feel this is an area easy to overlook, especially in departments where Paediatric emergencies are managed almost exclusively by PEM trainees/staff grades/consultants with not much exposure for the rest of the team.
A typical example for my 'Manageable size' crossword topics would be: Paediatrics; Orthopaedics; Cardiology; Anatomy & Pharmacology. 3 clues from each category, and job done!!
