Virgin Care engaged 86% of employees with Totara Learn in the first 20 weeks since its launch

Virgin Care is a private provider of health services to the NHS in England. They have treated over 7 million people in the last 10 years with front-line NHS and social care services across the country.

The Challenge

Virgin Care had previously been using a proprietary LMS. Their users found this system hard to navigate, and LMS administrators found the system inflexible with ineffective reporting.

Staff did not enjoy using this outdated system, meaning engagement levels were not where Virgin Care wanted them to be.

Virgin Care needed to procure a more modern LMS to enable them to deliver a range of training interventions and continued personal development to improve service delivery and reduce the cost of training.

It also needed to help them comply with strict statutory and mandatory training requirements in the highly regulated healthcare sector, helping Virgin Care employees provide ‘care good enough for our own families’.

The Solution

Virgin Care chose to work with Totara Partner Chambury Learning Solutions for this project. The initial planning workshop took place in March 2016, and they needed to have the platform live and accessible to staff by the end of May.

As this project needed a relatively fast turnaround, there were several key milestones which needed to be hit to ensure that the late-May deadline would be hit. By just the seventh week of the project, the LMS was built, and it was made available to 500 new starters.

They had no training or local support – just a one-page ‘how-to’ email – to help understand how people would naturally interact with the system. Three weeks later, it was made available to a second wave of 250 new starters.

Once they had feedback from this initial user group, Chambury Learning Solutions could work to refine the platform.

They configured the LMS to ensure single sign-on for all users, making the user experience as seamless as possible, and data from their legacy system was loaded into their Totara Learn.

Reports were also made live for the management team to give them access to their employees’ progress.

With regards to the LMS itself, the content for the induction process was 100% SCORM, and was targeted to meet the core statutory and mandatory training topics for new starters. This covered topics such as health and safety, fire hazards, equality, infection prevention and more.

Other content used on the LMS includes seminar management, quizzes and embedded video, and is targeted to ensure it is only accessed by those who need to see it.

The platform was also fully customised with Virgin Care’s branding. Chambury Learning Solutions worked closely with the internal marketing team to reflect their corporate identity.

The Totara Learn was designed to mirror their existing intranet site to lead users to believe they are in a single system, with an Active Directory integration with single sign-on implemented to facilitate this.

The Results

Since going live in May 2016, Virgin Care has seen some excellent results from Totara Learn.

More than 4,300 staff now actively log in and use the LMS for their mandatory training – over 86% of employees.

This amounts to over 10,000 course completions and 5,000 mandatory training completions since go-live, and 35,000 certification completions (including legacy data uploaded during the site build).

Impressively, these results were achieved within just 20 weeks from the project planning process, demonstrating how much of an impact the LMS made in a very short space of time.

Reports pulled from the LMS also demonstrate that up to 71% of staff are now compliant for the Core Skills Framework topics.

In December 2016 Nurse and Midwife Revalidation will go live in the LMS using Chambury Learning Solution’s bespoke custom toolkit that is fully integrated to Totara Learn. This will allow their nursing and midwife population across the UK to record their CPD, Practice hours, reflections and feedback directly alongside their coporate training records.

They are also about to open the system up to allow external users to access and pay for their internal content.

Thanks to Chambury Learning Solutions, Virgin Care now has an LMS to be proud of, which is already delivering fantastic results to help increase their standard of care.

“The Totara solution has received very favourable feedback from both staff and management here at Virgincare. The platform has delivered a simplified access to learning materials and provides users with a much needed record of learning, particularly for Statutory and Mandatory subjects. The reporting function is now being refined to produce valuable management information around corporate and local education/training requirements. At all times Chambury Learning Solutions have provided expert advice, been flexible in their approach to product delivery, and continue to support Virgincare post implementation.” – Virgin Care