Royal Melbourne Hospital saves 1,000 hours on learning admin a month with increased automation

The Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) was established in 1848, was Victoria’s first public hospital and is one of Australia’s oldest public hospitals.

RMH is one of Australia’s leading public healthcare providers and one of the largest healthcare providers in the state of Victoria, Australia, providing a comprehensive range of specialist medical, surgical, and mental health services, as well as rehabilitation, aged care, outpatient and community programs.

RMH is located in the “Melbourne Biomedical Precinct” in Parkville alongside The Royal Children’s Hospital, The Royal Women’s Hospital and Peter McCallum Cancer Centre, all of whom are also Totara clients.

The Challenge

At the Royal Melbourne Hospital, excellence in clinical care is underpinned by an embedded culture of continuous learning and development and research engagement.

RMH is a large healthcare organization with over 11,000 staff plus volunteers and students, and they faced the challenge of upgrading to a new learning platform. This was needed to facilitate new staff onboarding and training, support the essential ongoing training needs of existing staff and provide improved management and reporting.

RMH sought a platform to realize efficiencies in the delivery of both mandatory and optional learning and development opportunities to increase productivity.

Increasing the scope of the challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic that required social distancing, limited face-to-face learning, virtual learning and flexibility for remote working had a significant impact on the ability to both support implementation and complete essential training.

The Solution

To meet the challenge, the Totara Talent Experience Platform (TXP) includes the Totara Learn LMS and the Androgogic Edition of add-ons including the sophisticated Androgogic Catalog and the Androsync integration toolset.

The new LMS has the following high-level features:

• Contemporary look and feel
• Intuitive user interface
• A shared calendar of learning opportunities
• Automated allocation of learning
• Earlier access for new staff
• Integration with video conferencing platforms

The new LMS provides RMH with a more robust and reliable training platform, to meet the learning needs of its staff and the education departments at RMH, through:

• Facilitating rapid onboarding for new staff
• Single sign-on with two-step authentication support
• Ensuring compliance learning is completed
• Supporting the ongoing education of clinicians completing transition to practice programs (e.g. graduate nursing programs, or entry to practice transition Allied Health programs)
• Supporting the many undergraduate student placements that RMH conducts, to ensure that students on placement receive the right compliance training and learning support for their placements
• The audience feature has made the allocation of compliance training (mandatory training) a breeze, facilitating the automated allocation of the right compliance training based on the staff member’s division, role, work area, or a combination
• Automated email reminders for certifications ensures staff are aware of upcoming compliance training that is due
• Managers are able to have a real-time view of the compliance statistics for their staff, and are enjoying looking at reports!
• The seminar feature allows RMH to move away from third-party booking sites, and manage the registration and attendance-taking within the LMS
• RMH is able to easily develop new learning, increasing its catalog of discretionary learning to move learning away from “mandatory training” to learning that staff are actively seeking out
• Educators are able to schedule seminars or virtual classroom training sessions directly in Totara with either Microsoft Teams or Webex session details, enabling remote work and physical distancing during the COVID pandemic and greater participation from staff across multiple hospital sites
• Report builder is a dream! RMH is able to rapidly prototype and build new reports, and automate the sending of these reports to key stakeholders

The Results

“The new LMS allows for flexibility in a dynamic environment. The way in which we have been able to customize it to meet our needs has been highly beneficial. It is an intuitive system that can be used as a repository of learning, allocator of mandatory training and library of resources. All of these can be accessed on and offsite thus ensuring connectivity of all learners. Our clinicians are now seeing the benefit of this system and will continue to help grow and develop this LMS.”
– Clare Polley, Manager Medical Education, The Royal Melbourne Hospital

Royal Melbourne Hospital is very happy with their new learning management system.

The project was rolled out in six months, from the implementation planning study in June 2021 to the go-live in November 2021. Highlights include:

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, RMH’s project team was able to work effectively with internal learning delivery teams and their implementation partner to deliver the new platform on time
• Successful migration from the old system:
  • 375 courses migrated
  • 708 GB of course content
  • 669,900 historical training records
• On average, managers used to spend two hours per month to assign, allocate and review training completion in an application external to the old LMS. With the new LMS, training is auto-allocated, and managers can view their reports with just a few clicks (and some even ask for scheduled reports to be emailed straight to them!). With approximately 500 managers, that’s a time saving of 1,000 hours each month
• The external application that was used to assign, allocate and review training has been retired after the implementation of the new LMS. This provided a time saving of approximately two hours per week for the team that was previously maintaining the said application
• Average users per month have increased from 6,000 to 9,000
• The new LMS has facilitated the rapid rollout of a new cyber security mandatory training, with over 6,000 staff completing the training in three months

“Previous to the RMH Learning Hub, managers could find themselves spending hours chasing mandatory training completions. The reporting functions have allowed managers to spend less time hunting for this information as they can individualize it for their own area. Access to the RMH Learning Hub has increased productivity with many of our new starters keen to have a good start and completing their mandatory training prior to entering the building on their first day – this means clinicians are able to start treating patients quicker, which is really why we all work in healthcare.”
– Jane Jolley, Deputy Director Allied Health, The Royal Melbourne Hospital