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Introduction from Graham Nimmo
Overview of COVID-19: Critical Care
Hello. It’s my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to this online resource, COVID-19 Critical Care Understanding and Application. My name is Graham Nimmo. I’m the co-director of the MSc in critical care online at the University of Edinburgh, a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. And I’m making this video on behalf of our team and my friend and colleague, co-director David Griffith, who’s an intensive at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and a researcher there. So I mentioned our team. And I’ll just go through them to introduce you. You’ll meet them on the platform and online. Olga Paterson, Lindsay Rutherford, Chris McKenzie, and Vanessa Mather. The purpose of this short introduction is threefold.
The first is to welcome you, which I’ve done. The second is to tell you about this resource, what it is, and what it isn’t, what it does, and what it doesn’t do. And the third is to thank all of those people who have made it possible to get to this stage. 14 days ago– so this is Monday, the 6th of April. 14 days ago, this was an idea, a concept. At 1 o’clock this morning, it went live on the FutureLearn platform. And we had over 5,000 individuals enrolled at that time from 25 different countries around the world. That hasn’t happened spontaneously, as you can imagine.
So I’m just going to go through and, in temporal terms, the people who have facilitated that, supported it, and done the work. Initially, Sarah Henderson and Simon Riley at the University of Edinburgh who cleared the runway, if you like, for us to get started. I would like to applaud the principal Peter Mathieson and the vice principal Colm Harmon at The University of Edinburgh for their vision and their egalitarianism giving us the remit to share our MSE and critical care resources freely with you and to help you and your patients and their relatives and others. There’s been a ruling team involved over the last couple of weeks. I’m going to just very briefly mention them by name.
We’ll get a more formal thank you on the website in due course. They know who they are. Eleanor Campbell and Charlie Farley, Stuart Nicol, Jon Jack, Lizzy Garner-Foy, Marshall Dozier and Angela Laurins, Jeanette Stevenson at the Royal College of Physicians, a great supporter of our masters programme, Jen Durkin and Lauren Johnston-Smith, the University of Edinburgh, and two individuals in particular from out with our normal academic collaboration, and those are Robyn McKenna, Mcgraw-Hill, and Michael Hartley of Elsevier. These are senior individuals within those publishing houses. We approached them both with this concept and asked them if they would allow us to share some of their great textbooks with you, our leaners.
And I’m delighted to say that Mcgraw-Hill have gifted us Critical Care textbook and Elsevier Davidson’s Principles and Practise of Medicine and Evidence-Based Practise of Critical Care online for the duration of this project. And I really, really want to say thank you. Up until a week ago, I hadn’t actually interacted with FutureLearn. And over that week, we’ve got to know each other quite well. And it has been amazing watching the willingness, the openness, the patients, and the enthusiasm of all of the people we’ve engaged with. I have to say that’s the case right across the board for everybody that I’ve mentioned already. But I’d like to highlight our contacts in FutureLearn, Beatrix Daniel and Cristina Melidou particularly. So thanks to everybody.
I’m sorry if I missed anyone. We will be making a formal acknowledgment of thanks on the website and on the university and college hubs as well. So you’re here to learn. I’m delighted that so many people have decided to come and join us. So the first thing to say is this– this isn’t a standard FutureLearn course. It’s set up in weeks. And it’s got what you’ve achieved and the timings and a variety of other things, which if you’ve done FutureLearn courses before, you’ll be familiar with. We have taken learning resources and put them into that template, because it was quick to do that.
As I’ve said, FutureLearn have been so accommodating to help us to create something which is not what they would normally do. We’ve also done it in 14 days when this whole process would take six, nine, sometimes 12 months. So when you’re looking at it, bear that in mind. And maybe be a wee bit kind to us. Much of the material that we’ve used comes from our MSc programme in critical care. We’ve developed over the last couple of years. And a lot of it will have reference to other parts of the programme. And it will also have reference to things that you would do in the programme. So there are online tutorials and discussion boards and so on.
Those are part of this package. What this is is a learning hub. We brought together a lot of resources. And we’ve tried to put them into five themed areas so that when you go to that area, you will get what you need there. We’ve got some resources linked in from there. We have a Leganto resource list for the whole package. And you will see what that means. That takes you to more learning out with the actual platform. And we’re developing a small handbook with critical care to complement what’s on the pages here. But in the five domains, which you’ll see as soon as you go in, there are as if it’s five weeks of a course.
But we’ve got the deteriorating patient. That’s the patient in the ward prior to coming to critical care and then some critical care and emergencies particularly related to the ventilated patient. And we’ve then got daily Practise in critical care, working your way through a day in the ICU. And we’ve got a lot of video material there from the master’s programme which will support that. We have a COVID specific week. And that will be very obvious what’s on there. We’ll bring up to date material. We will try to update this as rapidly as possible.
But if you come across something that you think we could use and utilise– I say this about the whole learning hub, learning package if you want– please, please get in touch with us. And the fourth week is on ventilation and organ support. And that can be applied to critically ill patients who have COVID-19 and to others. And then the final part, I want to mention Dorothy Armstrong. Dorothy is a critical care nurse initially. And she and I have been working together on what we call Caring Human Factors in the last couple years. So we have an area on self care and staff well-being. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not giving you things to read and things to look at.
What we’re trying to do is to provide you with an actual toolkit of practises which you can incorporate into your daily work and at home and hopefully will help get all of us through what we’re experiencing at the moment. And we’re very interested in your feedback on those. I’d like to mention our educators who’ve helped to develop this very rapidly and will be involved either in the background or at the front end. You’ll meet them as we go through. So Amber Kennedy, Andy Boyle, Alastair Morgan, Scott McNeil have been helping with each of those themes as we’ve developed them. So that’s where we are. This is day one. Looking at the clock, we’ve been live for seven hours, 50 minutes.
I really hope that you get what you need from this. It’s trying to bring things together in one place that are usable and you can then take back into Practise. And what I said earlier on, the reason we’re all here is to help you, to help your colleagues, to help your patients, and their relatives and loved ones at this time, which is unprecedented in the last century, to share that common humanity which we have. It’s a real privilege to have been able to help to coordinate and to get this up and running. We look forward to meeting you on the discussions and to hearing your feedback. And I hope you enjoy the learning as you go through it.
Thank you very much.
Hello, and a warm welcome to the COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application course, whether you are a new or returning learner.
The original welcome video was recorded back on Monday 6th April 2020 when the first wave of COVID-19 was sweeping through the United Kingdom, Europe and the world. Since then, around 45,000 learners from 197 countries have engaged with these learning materials.
Since a second wave of COVID-19 appears imminent, we have made the decision to launch another run of our course. The content and philosophy of my original introduction remain highly pertinent and are still current, although some of the detail may have changed. This will be reflected in what you find week by week in the course materials themselves.
We hope that you will find what you need personally, clinically and professionally, and that you will enjoy learning with us.
Warm regards,
Graham Nimmo and the Course Team
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COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application
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COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application
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