Health Education England elearning for healthcare (HEE elfh) has updated the free Respiratory Physiotherapy elearning programme to further support physiotherapists treating patients with respiratory conditions, including COVID-19.

The programme, developed in partnership with the University of Southampton, Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, launched in September 2020 to support existing and newly qualified physiotherapists who want to update their respiratory knowledge and skills to help prepare them for working in daily and emergency out of hours respiratory care.

The updated content features 4 real life scenarios which have been designed to take learners through the journey of being on-call – from taking initial patient information to giving advice to the medical team. Each scenario gives learners the opportunity to apply their knowledge from the elearning programme to a real life scenario and enables learners to think about their clinical reasoning as the case unfolds.

For example, 1 scenario involves a physiotherapist assessing a patient with existing Bronchiectasis who is presenting with sputum retention and Type 2 Respiratory Failure. The learner is then given the assessment findings and asked to clinically reason and identify the patient’s problems and develop a management plan.

All 4 scenarios end with an opportunity for learners to reflect on their learning and decide what other course of action they might take if they are called to support a similar scenario in practice.

For more information and to access the new resources, please visit the Respiratory Physiotherapy programme page.