Designing an online training course for professionals dealing with pornography use and sexual dysfunctions
Background: Over the past decade, it has become clear that there is a relationship between pornography use and some of the issues encountered by professionals working in areas as diverse as health, education and the law. The World Health Organization established a diagnosis for compulsive sexual behaviour disorder (6C72) in ICD-11 in 2018. What do people working with individuals having problems with problematic pornography use or compulsive sexual behaviour disorder need to know? Who could provide that knowledge and how can it be delivered in a form that is simultaneously accessible, affordable, and based on quality, peer-reviewed research?
Methods: This case study explores the process used by the non-profit Reward Foundation in developing a continuing professional development course accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners in London. The six-hour online course was built upon an existing, accredited, one-day face-to-face course that had been delivered dozens of times over a five-year period. An online learning platform hosts a course mixing short videos from seven international subject experts along with a substantial selection of interactive learning materials, articles and treatment options.
Results: The curriculum developed offers insights from three leading certified sex-addiction therapists, a neuroscientist, a neurosurgeon, a urologist, and a leading psychologist specialising in strokes and sexual strangulation. Content is diversity friendly, and provides separate perspectives for the many issues encountered by adult men, women, adolescents and children. Perspectives cover the pornography users themselves, their sexual partners,and impacts on the wider community including criminality. The course is hosted by a lawyer and researcher who has a decade of experience in public communication on pornography-harm-awareness. Given the crosscutting and wide range of material included in the course, the accrediting body used five separate clinicians to examine the quality of the content. All people completing the course are encouraged to provide feedback through the online learning platform.
Conclusions: Creating a training course suitable for professionals coming from a diverse range of sectors on a subject as controversial as pornography and health required the development of deep relationships with the technical experts who featured in the videos. They had to buy into a collective vision, while also feeling that their individual expertise was fully respected. It was essential to develop a strong relationship of trust with the accreditation team at the Royal College. There was also a need for patience as there is no precedent or model available to allow simple like-for-like comparison. This made for a lengthy accreditation process.
