Allied Healthcare engages staff with e-learning and Care Certificate

Allied Healthcare is an approved healthcare supplier to the NHS, and has been delivering home care that makes a real difference to people’s lives for over 40 years. They are the UK’s leading provider of domiciliary care, supplying over 17 million hours of life-enhancing care every year. They have deep expertise across a wide range of home care services – from visiting care to very specialist services.

Their experience includes caring for children with behavioural needs, support for people with disabilities, reablement care for those recovering from illness or injury, and expert clinical care by community nurses.

The Challenge

Allied Healthcare operate across the UK and staff provide care in homes throughout the community and like many other organisations in this sector they also have a high turnover of staff. They acknowledged they needed an engaging and efficient way to deliver the Care Certificate to their staff for compliance and be able to provide accurate compliance reports to the CQC.

Introducing the Care Certificate training represented a cultural change within the organisation as staff were not used to having regulatory demands imposed on them. Allied Healthcare wanted to find a way to add value to their staff not just impose demands or tick boxes. Giving staff access to additional learning so staff can upskill themselves was recognised as a good way of achieving this.

The Solution

Allied Healthcare decided e-learning would be the most effective way to provide engaging training for staff and achieve compliance. They worked with Learning Heroes to produce seven core modules to cover the Care Certificate Induction requirements. This was a partnership approach with Allied Healthcare providing SME content and support assistance and Learning Heroes providing their experience of developing fun, engaging, bite-sized content.

Allied Healthcare also needed a way for staff to easily access the e-learning content and then report on completion. They elected to implement Totara Learn as their LMS. The key reasons for selecting Totara Learn were:

• Ease of access and use – the system is easy to navigate and can be accessed from any device and location.
• Customisation – the system can be easily customised to meet their individual needs.
• Flexibility – the scope of the system can be expanded in the future – i.e. to use as a full Learning Management System.
• Rapid implementation – the system can be implemented quickly to meet tight project timescales.

As the use of e-learning and the Totara Learn platform represented both a cultural and process change for the organisation, the Learning and Development team decided a hands-on roll out was required. They initiated a comprehensive internal communications campaign to engage with staff across the UK.

Representatives from the Learning and Development team visited every site to meet with teams and provide personal, hands-on information and support. They used this opportunity to upload users directly onto the system and mapped them to the organisations hierarchy. Once added to the system, users are automatically sent an email with their username and password and staff are automatically targeted with the training requirements appropriate to their role.

Although Totara Learn can easily be updated with new starters and leavers through integration with an organisations HR System or Active Directory, Allied Healthcare decided they wanted to do this process manually to ensure the information they have on the LMS is ‘clean data’. This has been a valuable data cleansing exercise as they can now look to use this information to update their central systems.

Totara Learn was customised with a simple look and feel which has given staff confidence to use it. They were also provided with videos and documentation if they required additional support to get started. Staff are encouraged to personalise the tool with their own avatar so that they feel ownership of the system.

The Care Certificate e-learning modules are:

• Understand Your Role
• Equality and Diversity for Health and Social Care
• Work in a Person-Centred Way
• Communication Health and Social Care
• Privacy and Dignity
• Mental Health Awareness
• Managing Stress for Health and Social Care

We’ve always wanted to adopt the 70:20:10 approach for the development of our people, but in the past were held back by a perceived lack of technology and knowledge across our people and departments. Discovery has broken that mould and has enabled us to provide ‘just-in-time’ compliance training to our people out in the field, reducing the need for them to come into the office for the more traditional classroom training. We finally have a true ‘blended approach’ to our core training needs and the rest of our business is beginning to follow suit. One year in and we have not even scraped the surface of the potential Totara Learn can provide us.
– Chris Hartley, LMS & E-learning Manager, Allied Healthcare

The Results

Allied Healthcare adopted a simple approach to implementation with very clear goals and as a result the implementation took less than three months and has been very successful.

In the last year, over 2,600 staff have logged into Totara Learn and completed at least five core e-learning courses including, Infection Prevention and Control, Fire Safety for Health and Social Care, Introduction to Health and Safety, COSHH, Safeguarding Adults and Fluids and Nutrition.

Staff can see exactly what training they are required to complete and by when and managers are also able to report on this. In turn, Learning and Development can efficiently and accurately report compliance figures to the CQC on the Care Certificate.

The main success however, has been with providing staff with easy access to learning activities. The entire Learning Heroes e-learning catalogue is accessible to all staff, who are openly encouraged to undertake additional learning. This has been viewed very positively by staff who are engaged and proactively completing additional training courses in their own time.

“Discovery has unexpectedly become a leader of change across our organisation, it’s innovation and creativity is influencing other areas of our business such as Marketing and Social media. What we thought would simply be a platform for housing Digital learning has grown into a key component which drives not only the majority of our learning initiatives, but things we never thought of such as smart reporting for compliance, social engagement platforms for people, and an ability for our entire network to share experiences and ideas.
– Chris Hartley, LMS & E-learning Manager, Allied Healthcare