Mountain Healthcare's online course booking system saves time for managers and learners alike

Mountain Healthcare is a UK business providing sexual assault referral services and police custodial healthcare.

The Challenge

The Mountain Healthcare team have been using Microsoft programs to create workbooks and face to face sessions to deliver their governance and compliance training. This time-consuming process lead to difficulties in accurately monitoring training and a dependence on the correct manual input of data.They often experience rapid periods of expansion when new contracts are won. This could be a sudden 50% growth and demands recruitment of a large number of new staff or the need to reallocate internal staff. The business needed a solution that could support training peaks of new staff for:

• The role, if it is new to them
• Statutory training requirements
• Continuing professional development

 Rapid expansion also put pressure on staff responsible for writing course content and helping to deliver the training, especially when those team members have primary roles outside of training. With no dedicated education team in place, the company needed a system that would centralise training for the learners who were spread across the country and save the trainers time.The company sought a system that would:

• Deliver valuable time savings
• Provide an accurate, clear record of learner’s training
• Support annual re-certifications and it’s continuous training programmes
• Have scope to support management training
• Enable them to provide training and support education for those outside of the company, internationally

The Solutio

 Following initial experimentation with Moodle, the company found that Totara Learn was more suited for business use and decided that it was the perfect solution to meet their needs.Mountain Healthcare assessed several Totara Learn providers and chose Totara platinum partners, HowToMoodle, to help them implement Totara Learn into the organisation.

“We appointed HowToMoodle largely due to them being the most approachable and honest. They knew what they were talking about and only said ‘yes’ when they meant ‘yes’ – there were no empty promises.” – Debs Woodcraft, Governance & Education Coordinator, Mountain Healthcare

HowToMoodle provide Mountain Healthcare with a managed hosting solution along with a fully designed theme service and in-depth Totara Learn training for key staff. HowToMoodle supported Mountain Healthcare throughout the implementation with mentor sessions and a configuration workshop. These helped ensure the system was set up with the right structures, workflows and reporting needed for their unique requirements.During implementation, the company prioritised carefully and carried out a series of pilot tests over the first few months. Because many of their staff weren’t as confident with IT systems, Mountain Healthcare ran a pilot for managers to help get them on board and become familiar with the system and how to manage it.  The main features Mountain Healthcare is currently using include:

• Certifications: Totara Learn is making a significant impact in supporting the company’s re-certification requirements. The company’s numerous training programmes have review dates throughout the year with annual formal recertification points. Totara Learn enable Mountain Healthcare to manage all of this through the certification function. As staff members become more competent and develop within their roles, their training and education needs to develop with them. Totara Learn supports this at every step.
• Seminar management: Mountain Healthcare is in the early stages of implementing Totara Learn’s seminar management module with high aspirations for its use. In 2018 the company will run over 200 face-to-face training courses and seminar events to its entire staff. Handling this schedule normally takes a vast amount of time, but the ability to manage all these events within Totara Learn will generate considerable time and efficiency savings for the company.
• Programs: The Programs capability in Totara Learn is being used for inductions to provide new starters with a central and consistent onboarding process.
• Open Badges: Open Badges in Totara Learn have been an instant success with the Mountain Healthcare team. They are excited to utilise this feature to recognise the achievements of completing their varied training programmes, with the ability to issues badges for courses, programs, certifications and audience membership.
• Reporting: Trainers now track their learners and view their actions within the Totara Learn system. Having this overview has been extremely beneficial to the team. Tracking attendance at Seminar events will be of huge value to them, ensuring they can accurately and quickly recompense their staff for attending face-to-face training.

The Results

The company currently has over 300 learners on the Totara Learn system, all of whom are geographically dispersed from their offices. Feedback on Totara Learn from learners is that the e-learning platform has been very helpful, and while the company has faced initial challenges in engaging their less IT competent users, onboarding activities have been created to encourage and support them to understand and use the system efficiently. Benefits are now being felt across all staff using the system.Mountain Healthcare has seen significant time savings so far from online bookings. This has saved hours of administrative time that was previously spent juggling with emails and documents. Now, with everything centralised, it is quick and easy for managers to see who has signed up and attended the training.

“For anyone wishing to implement an e-learning platform like Totara Learn quickly, I would strongly suggest freeing up at least one member of your team to concentrate on it, or get someone to do it for you. Having dedicated time to work on it is very helpful. Work out your needs and content, then, once you have this, take part in some configuration workshops – the sooner the better. These are really helpful and if you are armed with your needs and content you will get the most out of them.” – Debs Woodcraft, Governance & Education Coordinator, Mountain Healthcare

The company is still in the early stages of using the system, but will be keeping up the pace of their implementation over the next 12-18 months with plans for:

• Continued system roll-out with additional course content and users
• Implementation of a management training programme – something that would have been nearly impossible prior to Totara Lear
• Working with different departments to establish ways to automate and streamline processes and make time savings
• Greater support for training and education to others, outside of the business
• Using Totara Learn to manage appraisals for staff