Learn With Nurses offers free, dynamic and innovative virtual training for the entire clinical team. It's run by an incredible team of Nurses, with years of expertise and a passion for learning. We had the privilege of talking to founder and Cardiovascular Nurse Specialist Michaela Nuttall, about how it all began.
We’d love to know more about you, and the Learn With Nurses story?
I’m very fortunate as I love working and do a variety of different roles in my Nursing job. One of these roles is around education and training. I've been providing face-to-face training for years including hundreds of study days, and updates, predominantly around the prevention or management of cardiovascular disease.
When the pandemic hit, face-to-face training stopped overnight; health checks, training, programmes; everything. I really missed teaching, and more importantly, illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, strokes, hypertension — they hadn't gone away, and they weren’t getting the time and attention they needed.
I kept seeing webinars being advertised online by a whole host of organisations and decided to put out a session called 'Understanding Blood Pressure'. I advertised the session, and boom, over a hundred people registered. I realised I had something here and set up a series called 'Lockdown Learning' with my friends and colleagues. We made it really simple, presenting short courses with time for Q&A at the end.
We thought all we were doing was talking a bit about blood pressure or how to read an ECG, but the reach and impact we were having, particularly on people's mental health, was enormous.
How did you learn about ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, and what makes it a good fit for you?
Initially we thought we had a slick process, using Zoom and Survey Monkey. This worked when we were running 1 or 2 webinars, but as we started reaching capacity, and building more, it fell apart. It also became really hard as our delegates started wanting certificates which meant we had to do a lot of mail merges. It was an absolute nightmare. We were also paying for Zoom, even though we were volunteer run, but we found it clunky and expensive and it was hard to engage with their help and support.
"I got a message from Phil, the Founder of ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, who had seen what we were doing and he showed me ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. As a free solution it seemed to be an absolute no brainer. The journey ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ has been on is incredible and it's been wonderful to be a part of it from the beginning."
We love ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and I'm always promoting it. Whenever I see people running education, I think 'Why are you using that? What are you doing? Let me introduce you to this.' It's also not just ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ itself that's brilliant, it's the support team too, everyone is incredibly helpful. I'm also really embedded in public health and I'm passionate about fairness and reducing inequalities that are out there which has synergy with what ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ are doing.
What has ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ enabled you to do, that you couldn't do before?
The platform has allowed us to grow fast and big. It took away the cost aspect for us, which was amazing because we'd never generated any money at Learn With Nurses.
Because of the flexibility within ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ we have also been able to evolve as we grow. For example, we've just started some new sessions, called ‘’ which we can run in partnership with other organisations such as White Swan, record them, and then make them available after. ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ just makes what we do so much better.
What are your proudest moments with Learn With Nurses?
The first one is the value beyond education that it brings. I'm blown away by the feedback that we get. People love us and really enjoy attending our sessions. It makes them feel better about themselves.
"I love that it has impact on patient care, because that's ultimately what you want to see. When I see that someone has learnt something with us, and then they relate it back into what they're doing and it makes a difference to patients — that is incredible."
I also love the people that volunteer with us, and our group is forever growing. I give up a lot of my time, so I love and appreciate the energy from the volunteers that we have, not just the trainers that you see, but the back office function as well and all the different people that are involved. It's an amazing team effort.
