Key takeaways from the Adult Learning session yesterday at the Pharmaceutical Meeting Planners Forum, led by Henry Slotnick, PhD, PhD:
* Physicians want solutions to problems they already have, not hypotheticals. Select topics they are dealing with daily.
* Physicians want to participate in their own learning. Create a case involving your topic, then give them the full range of possible solutions, with no bias showing toward any one solution. Then let them come up with the answer themselves.
* Multiple interventions are needed for behavior change to occur. Docs learn in episodes, and each episode has stages. Physicians learn different things at different stages of learning.
* You can use these principles of adult learning with senior management as well: Identify their problems, give them a case study and a possible range of solutions, and let them figure it out. Then come at the issue again with a different case, or an article on the topic, or some other intervention, and again let them figure it out.
This is an extremely slimmed down version of his presentation. For more on the topic, check out this article: The epidemiology of physician learning.
