Aims/Objectives/Background The Emergency Department (ED) is a busy environment due to shift patterns and high acuity, which can make arranging formal teaching sessions difficult. We proposed daily ’15-minute Hot Topic Teaching’ sessions with feedback questionnaires used to evaluate these. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of daily ’15-minute Hot Topic Teaching’ sessions in a Paediatric Emergency Department.

Methods/Design A daily teaching programme was designed and implemented in a busy tertiary Paediatric Emergency Department. The teaching sessions were performed for 15 minutes at 1 pm on Monday to Friday for all clinical ED staff members. Following each teaching session, participants completed a feedback questionnaire to evaluate the teaching session. This assessed the ‘overall rating of the teaching session’, ‘change in confidence in application of knowledge’, and ‘the rating of how appropriate the length of the teaching session was’.

Results/Conclusions Overall, 200 questionnaire feedbacks were completed. The average rating for the teaching sessions was 9.07/10 (0 being ‘very poor’ and 10 being ‘excellent’). The participants’ confidence in application of knowledge improved on average from 5.44/10 before the session to 8.04/10 following it (0 being ‘no confidence’ and 10 being ‘very confident’). The teaching session length was reported as ‘about right’ by 92%, with 8% stating they were either ‘too long’ or ‘too short’. ED clinical staff attending included doctors (47.5%), Advanced Nurse Practitioners (19.5%), nursing staff (12%), Physician Associates (9.5%), Health Case Assistants (3%), and ‘other’ members including medical students, nursing students and paramedic students (8.5%).

This study shows that daily 15-minute teaching sessions are an effective way of delivering teaching in a busy Paediatric Emergency Department to a wide variety of clinical staff. The sessions have improved confidence and knowledge in a variety of topics and are an appropriate length of time, making them ideal for use in Emergency Departments.