Abstract
Conflict resolution skills are important for all healthcare professionals. Conflict and miscommunication can have detrimental effects on decision-making, potentially impacting on patient-care, morbidity and mortality, making upskilling of health professionals’ conflict resolution skills important. However, research suggests only around 10–15% of training knowledge and skills transfers to the workplace, making training a seemingly poor investment. Via a retrospective online survey, this study examined factors associated with the transfer and maintenance of conflict resolution skills of medical officers and healthcare professionals who undertook relevant training. The results of multivariable linear regression analyses showed that 77% of the variance was predicted for training transfer and 42% for training maintenance predominantly by individual (e.g. emotional intelligence and motivation) and organisational transfer climate factors (e.g. support and goal-setting cues). These results have implications for healthcare organisations in regards to how they motivate and support staff before and after training to increase transfer and maintenance of conflict resolution skills.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Suzanne Edwards, Statistician, from the Adelaide Health Technology Assessment (AHTA), University of Adelaide, with the analysis of the quantitative data. The authors also wish to acknowledge the support and assistance of Ronda Bain, Lisa Vertue and the Training and Development units for their advice, support and assistance in contacting learners on our behalf.
Declaration of Interest. This study was supported through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a Faculty of Health Sciences Divisional scholarship from the University of Adelaide, South Australia; awarded to the first author. The authors report no other potential conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.
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Vandergoot, S., Sarris, A., Kirby, N. (2018). Factors That Influence the Training Transfer and Maintenance of Conflict Resolution Programs of Healthcare Training and Development Units: A Retrospective Study. In: Leung, MT., Tan, LM. (eds) Applied Psychology Readings. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8034-0_7
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