Braemar Hospital reduces paper processes with easy-to-use Totara Learn

Braemar Hospital, founded in 1926, is one New Zealand’s largest private hospitals. It is owned by the Braemar Charitable Trust located in Hamilton, New Zealand.

The Hospital prides itself on being innovative and offering the most up-to-date facilities and tools for medical professionals. More than 100 top-class specialists work at Braemar Hospital and teams carry out approximately 10,000 surgical and medical procedures a year.

The Challenge

The delivery, management, and tracking of clinical and non-clinical training across all areas of the organisation is critical to achieving the necessary levels of healthcare compliance at Braemar Hospital.

The organisation needed an LMS that could help manage training programmes and track performance for both critical and non-critical staff in one place. Prior to the implementation of Totara Learn, training and performance appraisal records were held manually in the organisation. This made tracking and collating completion progress and records challenging when required by external auditors.

The Solution

Through a competitive bidding process, Braemar Hospital chose Totara Partner LearningWorks to implement Totara Learn LMS. LearningWorks started by conducting a discovery process with the client using Google Forms.

The resulting Discovery Document detailed the outcomes of this process and the expected learner journey. This initial data gave LearningWorks a firm platform to start from for engaging the client in a solution that would work for their existing organisational hierarchy and processes.

For example, LearningWorks ascertained that there would be an initial HR import required to break staff down into departments and positions. This discovery data provided the Hierarchy for users and helped the team set up Reports and Dashboards.

The login page was kept very clean for ease of use and was checked to make sure it was fully mobile and tablet compatible.

The primary dashboard features a customised news area to show the latest news to staff, with a slider above to highlight features and areas in the site. The manager dashboard is used to show reports for the manager to view staff progress.

Braemar Hospital makes use of the dynamic audience function to organise learning. Audiences were created to manage each Nurse Type and to assign goals, learning plans and courses. So, when a nurse joins the Acute Care department, for example, they are automatically assigned a learning plan with the necessary learning programmes they need to complete.

This smart use of dynamic audiences has meant huge time savings in learning administration.

 Progress towards the use of blended learning across the organisation has been incredible. Within five months of introducing the system, competencies, certifications, and goals are used to track nurses throughout their learner journey, and to keep nurses completing certifications  at each required timeframe.

These have been combined with reports for managers so that staff are notified when items are coming up and what they need to do to complete each section. 

Everyone in the organisation needs to complete the annual Fire Safety course, so this has been set up as a “Certificate”, thus automatically sending out an annual reminder for everyone who needs to complete this.

Josleen Itayi, Perioperative Nurse Educator and PDRP Coordinator uses Totara Learn to create nursing courses as well as bringing in lessons created using H5P. LearningWorks provided instructions on how to do this, for the Braemar team.

A library dashboard was set up to hold custom content which is divided up into Clinical and Non-clinical topics. Styles were updated to layout the page to be visual for Nurses that would need to access the information.

To further move processes away from paper, LearningWorks also added the ‘On-the-Job Training’ (OJT) plugin to Totara Learn which has revolutionalised staff orientation at Braemar Hospital. Now, staff can view what’s completed online, and managers get notifications and add notes when the staff has completed the programme.

Not only has the delivery of learning been impacted by the introduction of Totara Learn, but the organisation has also adopted the Performance Management function to bring the management of performance appraisals online.

This has done away with paper records and the process has been enhanced by employees and managers being prompted by stages in the development cycle and both parties being able to frequently update their performance records; a big improvement from an annual paper-based process where records get put away and often only looked at again in 12 months’ time.

Working with the Braemar team, LearningWorks also integrated an e-portfolio using Mahara to hold Nurses PDRP (nurses e-portfolios) and set up a submission process around these as well. Mahara was set up with nine ‘smart evidence sections’ that would allow the PDRP portfolios to be broken down into each area so that those involved in making the work could manage submissions.

“We are proud to have an LMS that enables delivery, management and tracking of staff learning, development and performance all in one place. Managers now have visibility of their staff development progress and compliance. Easy and simple was the feedback that echoed from our staff upon the system introduction in July 2018.”

The Results

There are a number of ways in which, even after just five months, Braemar Hospital has seen significant benefits from implementing Totara Learn;

• Reduction of face-to-face training time by adopting online courseware which must be completed prior to face-to-face practical training
• Administration efficiencies gained by using smart functions such as learning plans, audiences, and certification functionality to automate the allocation of required training to specific roles in the organisatio
• More visibility and transparency over what training progress across the organisation with better centralisation and security of training records
• Managers receive notifications about staff training actions
• Enhancement of the performance appraisal process with more frequent notifications and commentary from all parties involved
• Organisation-wide progress reports available for senior management, and for auditing purposes.

The Braemar team wants to tackle more complex reports so that this can further support auditing and other decision-making across the organisation; the team is planning on taking the free Reporting course through the Totara Academy, to help learn more on this topic.