Totara LMS enables healthcare provider to achieve highest mandatory training compliance

Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust (HDFT) employs approximately 5500 staff who provide healthcare services across 3 integrated care systems looking after over 500,000 children and providing community services to a population of approximately 620,000. The geographical spread of our services is from Wakefield 170 miles north to Northumberland up the east coast of England.

The Challenge

HDFT’s expansion of services from one acute hospital setting in 2011 to a community and acute service has in turn brought new challenges for the education of the employees whose number have more than doubled in the last 10 years from approximately 2500 staff to approximately 5500.

With the challenge of providing education across this large geographical area under tight budgetary restrictions that are experienced across the NHS as a whole we turned to a Learning Management System which enabled us to host learning electronically. This LMS was low cost but not fit for purpose. Its clunky experience created a reputation of inaccessibility of education to users and the complicated set up of the back end of the system created a large amount of time required for administrative tasks for the management and reporting of data.

As the pandemic hit and electronic learning became the safest option for our employees our reliance on our LMS stepped up and our current solution continued to fall short of the education resource that we needed to provide. Amid the pandemic, July 2021, the month before we implemented our new Totara LMS provided by Totara partner Chambury Learning, our overall percentage compliance was 76%, 14% below our 90% target.

The Solution

Our new Totara LMS provided by Chambury Learning was the solution to our problems. With immediate effect at the point of implementation in August 2021 we received feedback from learners of the ease of use when accessing the system. Guidance required for new starters to be able to obtain their login details and access their system was immediately reduced from a facilitator led session to a one page guide.

Learner led learning moved away from the basic option of SCORM eLearning packages to a wealth of options from workbooks, handbooks, resources, videos, and self-declarations of understanding/completion.

The ability to set up reporting with appropriate access levels has opened up useful data and the ability for the management of compliance across a number of different roles.

The unique interface developed, piloted and implemented through Chambury Learning allows the transferability of mandatory training compliance aligned to the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF).

Results

The easy intuitive use of the Totara platform and the support from Chambury Learning meant we were able to go live with like-for-like functionality as on our previous LMS within 6 weeks. Within a further 6 weeks our Mandatory Training Lead had set up the bespoke reporting and dashboards to enable live access to compliance data.

With a huge reduction in support required for learners to be able to access their eLearning we have seen a rise in eLearning completions to approx. 6000 completions in February 2023.

Trainers are able to manage their own training numbers and managers are able to see compliance by topic and overall for their direct and indirect reports. Our Mandatory Training Lead has used the dashboard functionality along with global restrictions to set up availability of pertinent data for mandatory training compliance for Directorate leads and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

The mandatory training leads ad hoc reporting requests since implementation have reduced by 75% as interested parties can access the data themselves via our Totara platform.

On a monthly basis a full set of mandatory training compliance reporting is produced by the Mandatory Training Team: this data set has been required for a number of years. Since implementation of our Totara platform the time it takes to produce this has been reduced by 75% or 144 hours, for a cost saving of £2,880.

The flexibility provided by the choice of activities Totara includes on its platform has enabled us to be able to upload learning quickly and easily reducing development time across newly launched mandatory training topics and existing topics in need of alternative more accessible formats to enable compliance increase. Where facilitator led directly onto dates linked to their mandatory training list of requirements ensuring they are attending the correct course with the correct course to deem them competent which in turn has led to increasing compliance.

In addition the functionality within our Totara LMS for the automated reminder notifications has supported attendance of delegates at facilitator led training as often bookings are done far in advance in line with the timescales required for the rostering process. Reminders to staff nearer the event time reduces no shows.  The actions of cancellation from training sessions has ensured the availability of spaces for other staff if learners can’t attend.  50% of cancellations made on our system in the past 12 months were actioned by the learner themselves reducing the admin burden of these cancellations that would all have previously been made via phone or email to training teams.

The interface between ESR and our Totara platform ensures the continuing transferability of mandatory training compliance aligned to the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF) ensuring training does not need to be repeated by staff moving to us as an employer.  This is particularly useful with doctors in training who frequently move in and out of healthcare providers. Over 1,000 updates to certifications were processed via this interface in March 2023 alone.  This process saves time and money across the organisation.

The encompassing result of this solution has been to increase mandatory training compliance by 13% from 76% to 89% over the past 18 months since implementation. This level of compliance has never been reached at HDFT, and we are now just 1% away from our target of 90%.

“The ease of being able to access Learning Lab wherever and not having to be connected to the Trust network has made a huge difference in accessing training. Being able to always gather live reports of the teams’ compliance, rather than rely on monthly reports has made a significant difference in following up where compliance is low. Learning and Development have included little descriptors of reports which makes is even easier to know which report I need for my needs. I have been truly impressed with the work that has gone into making Learning Lab all that it is and evidenced by our increasing compliance. “

– Philippa Croft, Deputy Medical Education Manager