Professional educational interventions designed to improve knowledge and uptake of immunisations

The Healthy Child e-Learning Programme is a modular, educational intervention to support professionals to deliver the Healthy Child Programme (HCP). A group of clinical academics was convened to design an evaluation of the HCP e-Learning Programme. This article presents the findings of the literature review to identify a method of evaluating an educational intervention designed for professionals that improves knowledge. The discussion highlights the complexities of selecting an evaluation method that could be used or adapted for evaluating the HCP e-Learning Programme. The immunisation module was selected for evaluation, offering a number of measurable outcomes, including a secondary outcome measure of any increase in immunisation uptake in the evaluation population. Very few published papers were found evaluating educational interventions that were related to our search criteria, none of these papers evaluated the transfer of learning from the intervention against practice improvement outcomes or evaluated stakeholder perspectives. Evaluating an educational intervention with the aim of attributing improvements in practice solely to that intervention is complex and resulted in the task group mapping all the factors that occurred in the literature that may influence immunisation uptake to construct a conceptual framework to inform our evaluation design.