Professor Kevin Channer, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
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The ability to interpret ECG traces is a key skill for many different groups of health care professionals. Medical students, hospital based trainee doctors and physicians, nurses, paramedics and GP’s are being required to interpret ECG traces so as to speed up diagnosis of patients presenting with cardiac conditions. Treatment decisions often need to be made quickly and so it is increasingly important to record and interpret ECGs where the patients present. This may be in the community by ambulance paramedics visiting patients at home, or, GPs in surgery as well as patients presenting to hospital clinics.

WRHIP funding is allowing a multidisciplinary team of cardiology staff based in Sheffield to collaborate with Medcom Ltd, a University of York spin-out company to develop a structured training course to be delivered over the internet which aims to teach individuals how to take and interpret an ECG. It is hoped that the modules will produce improved training for NHS employees and the opportunity for individuals to monitor their own skills through using a number of “practice” cases which will be incorporated into the package.