NELFT achieves its best-ever compliance with a single integrated platform

Creating an integrated workforce development system that was easy to use, where staff can login at one location and more easily manage their Training, Appraisal (Non-Medical), Supervision and NMC Nurse Revalidation.

About NELFT

With an annual budget of £400m, NELFT provide care and treatment for a population of circa 4.3 million, employing approximately 6,000 staff working across 210 bases in London, Essex, Kent and Medway plus an additional 3,000 temporary staff providing an extensive range of both inpatient and outpatient integrated community and mental health services for people living in the London boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Havering, Redbridge and Waltham Forest and community health services for people living in the south west Essex areas of Basildon, Brentwood and Thurrock (totalling 2,914 square miles).

NELFT provide an Emotional Wellbeing Mental Health Service for children and young people across the whole of Essex. They are the provider of all age eating disorder services and child and adolescent mental health services across Kent and Medway. To achieve this NELFT work alongside local authorities.

The Challenge

As a large organisation NELFT have many IT systems and for staff this can get very confusing and time consuming, especially when using different passwords with different systems and sites. With that in mind they wanted to create an integrated workforce development system that was easy to use, where staff can login at one location and more easily manage their Training, Appraisal (Non-Medical), Supervision and NMC Nurse Revalidation.

The Solution

Working alongside other departments, NELFT wanted to bring supervision and nurse revalidation into the Organisational Development remit along with training and appraisals to create a single system. An internal stakeholder group was established and a procurement process was undertaken. Chambury Learning Solutions was then awarded the contract as their preferred partner.

Over the period of several months, all parties worked together to create, design and vicariously test the necessary four workflows. They went live in two phases; phase 1 with training, supervision and nurse revalidation that launched in September 2018 and phase 2 for appraisals in February 2019.

The Organisational Development team successfully integrated four IT systems into one and named the LMS ‘STEPS’;

• Staff
• Training
• Education
• Professional registration &
• Support

The Results

STEPS is easy to use and overall the feedback from their staff has been really positive.

Organisational engagement is extremely high one year on with the system seeing over 5,000 logins in the last 30 days, 6,355 logins in the last 90 days and 7,903 active users in the last 12 months.

From having a single point of access, integration between the modules, and easy to read RAG compliance ratings they now not only seamlessly give staff an integrated experience but ultimately created a system to guide staff easily through their career at NELFT.

Compliance for core skills training has improved beyond expectations, going from an average of 85% to above 95% in nearly all topics.

Appraisal compliance, which they have recently started reporting on again is steadily improving and in some areas such as Waltham Forest are seeing its best ever compliance (84.06%).

What the staff say

“Safe practice in nursing is underpinned in NELFT with the integrated systems, ensuring that monthly supervision and annual appraisal are available to all, training is easy to book and manage. All of which can be easily linked to the nurse revalidation system ensuring nurses can work towards revalidation in a time efficient way which is key in a busy health care environment.”

“I and several of my colleagues have found it to be a much easier process to book onto training and that the interface is very user friendly.“

“We are having some really good feedback from operational teams about STEPS!  Thank you!”

“I find STEPs so useful and very easy to access and well organised when navigating through it.”