Get to know the UBC CPD team — Meet Craig Ferguson, Learning and Curriculum Manager

Meet: Craig Ferguson

Title: Learning and Curriculum Manager

Portfolio: Creative Learning

Describe what you do and what programs you work on:

As a Learning and Curriculum Manager on the Creative Learning team, my role combines instructional design, project management, meeting facilitation and educational technology.

I work closely with our scientific planning committees to translate their expertise into education and then with our interactive designers to bring it to life with interactivity and visuals. The final products are engaging, self-paced and accessible to anyone in the world.  

Recent projects that I’ve worked on include online courses on BC’s fall prevention guidelines, improving care for people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and bringing the Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U) message to HIV care. I am also working on a project related to physician wellness for International Medical Graduates, as well as supporting our accreditation team.

Which partners do you work with most closely?

The BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), Child Health BC, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). In addition to these large health organizations, I also collaborate with people with lived experiences and cultural expertise.

Who does your work impact?  

I like to think that my work impacts all British Columbians who interact with the health-care system. The Creative Learning portfolio works with a range of partners to create education on a wide variety of topics. In most cases, the projects I work on are intended for health professionals broadly, including physicians, nurses and allied health professionals.

In what ways does this work impact the health community, health-care system, or wellbeing of the target audience?  

On the Creative Learning team, we’re uniquely positioned to support the needs of health professionals and the priorities of the health-care system. Our education is evidence-based, accredited, convenient and built on an understanding of the complexities of medical practice. We aim to distill expertise into practical lessons that health professionals can benefit from immediately.  

We’ve become the go-to partner for health organizations that want to disseminate new research or guidelines or support larger campaigns for systemic change in health care. For example, many of our eLearning modules were developed as complements to newly released guidelines, including Falls: Predictable and Preventable, the Pediatric Nutrition Guidelines Online Course and the Provincial Opioid Addiction Treatment Support Program. We also develop courses to promote less well-known research, such as Preventing Food Allergies in Infants, Sexually Transmitted and Blood-borne Infections: Barriers to Screening and Treatment as Empowerment: Advancing HIV Care with U=U.  

What do you think are the new opportunities (trends) affecting your work?  

The state of the art continues to advance and health professionals will always need trustworthy and convenient ways to stay up-to-date. Guideline updates, the use of new technologies in health care, and discoveries in medicine are unlikely to slow down, and we’ll be ready to help health professionals put them into practice.

Internally, we’re experimenting with new technologies to improve the experience for our learners and make accessing our award-winning CPD education even more convenient.