Challenge
Healthcare teams within the secure and detained estate are very busy, often struggling to attend traditional, face-to-face training sessions. In order to ensure access to training materials and advice and guidance on using SystmOne at difficult times, e.g. out of hours or as and when suited an individual best, the HJIS team set up an e-learning platform to facilitate this access and allow end users to access training and support when they needed it.
This early version of the platform had limitations however: it could be difficult to navigate and only allowed information to be uploaded as documents. The HJIS team began to investigate alternatives to find a more user friendly and intuitive system, one which would allow easier access and publication of a variety of different training materials including videos, presentations, animations and standard documentation.
During the project, the HJIS team was transferred over to NECS CSU and the in-house platform used by NECS’ Digital Transformation and Optimisation team was able to provide the upgraded functionality required.
Our response
- Engage with old provider to enquire about closing site down and how to retrieve data
- Engage with the NECS training team to enquire if it was possible for our team to host a learning service similar to the DTOS training team and the cost implications
- Planning meetings with DTOS team to set out a design for the portal, create an upload that would best suit our end users and allow us to make it easier for both our end users and team to navigate
- We also looked at what the portal could offer us for future initiatives such as training videos, course, and direct booking for training
- Organise a data cleanse and migration of all existing information on the old portal.
Outcomes
Following meetings, consultation and training, we have been able to create our new e-Learning platform, which is fresh in keeping with the NECS corporate image and also made accessing documentation much more user friendly. We have noticed more user engagement from the portal and are able to reach and engage with a wider audience by sending either an instant email message to the end user or a weekly update email to capture the updates. This also allows us to target specific audiences should the need arise.
Our new portal allows us to develop and share training videos, to ensure that we can disseminate and capture audience which may not always be able to attend weekday training, due to prison restrictions with IT/Internet access, working nights or other constraints out of their control. Since launching the initial platform, we have continued to develop this even further by offering courses which test the end users at the end of the training videos and produce a certificate of completion to allow staff to place this in their personal development plans/staff files. We are also able to keep an audit of who has completed each course and completed. Should the end users require extra input from our team we can follow this up with the site in person.
Our own training team and end users are now able to access documentation more easily as we have dedicated sections for each topic, which enables us to update documents quicker.
We have added ‘meet the team’ and case study pages, which allows users to find out about us, what skills we bring and add a more personal touch. The case study section allows end users to understand in more detail what, when and how this has helped shape the delivery of prison healthcare and the recording of critical information.
We have also been able to pass on a saving to our customer as the new portal is managed internally by NECS, meaning issues can be resolved immediately without external input. The support we have received has been excellent and the corporate engagement between teams has been warmly received by both teams and allowed for better knowledge sharing.
“The eLearning portal is very easy to access and use. The courses themselves are very explanatory, useful and the ability to come to the videos as and when needed is very reassuring. I found the visual training videos very clear and easy to follow.”