Education of instructors of a physical activity program for cancer patients and survivors: planning and evaluation of a poster presentation session

Introduction
The Belgian Foundation against Cancer proposes an adapted physical activity (APA) program for cancer patients and survivors, called Raviva (http://www.cancer.be/raviva-bouger-pour-se-sentir-mieux).The activities are supervised by instructors with inconstant trainings and experiences. Contrary to other countries, Belgian APA instructors do not necessarily need to follow specific education programs such those proposed by the ACSM (Schmitz et al., 2010).We were involved in the implementation of a specific training day for in-service Raviva instructors. As it is the case in sport coaches’ education (Erickson et al., 2008), interacting with colleagues seemed to be an appropriate method to improve APA instructors’ skills. Therefore, interactive methods were proposed to be used in order to increase the participants’ interest. The aim of this paper was to describe and analyse a poster presentation session as well as to identify good practices.
Methods
As part of the training day, the poster presentation session consisted to create groups of 4 to 5 persons and to ask them to imagine and share solutions to specific problems linked with psycho-emotional aspects of the instruction process with Raviva groups. Three methods were used to collect the data: interviews of the organizers (n=4), a questionnaire for all trainees (n=35) and participant observation.
Results
Examples of good practices were listed and exchanged between the participants. All trainees considered that the poster presentation session was interesting and most of them (94%) reported that appropriate themes were discussed. Moreover, 88.2% of the participants mentioned that they were able to share their experiences. Three expressed negative opinions about the organization. These opinions were supported by all organizers as well as by the observation.
Conclusions
This educational tool seems to be interesting. However, organizers should plan enough time for such activity. Moreover, the time allocation between each part of the session should be better prepared and controlled.