York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust saves £100,000 on training a year with Totara Learn

York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust provides a comprehensive range of acute hospital and specialist healthcare services for approximately 800,000 people living in and around York, North Yorkshire, North East Yorkshire and Ryedale – an area covering 3,400 square miles.

The Challenge

In 2012, Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust merged with its neighbouring acute trust and its local community trust to create a new, much larger organisation.

Their LMS at the time was a proprietary solution that wasn’t flexible enough to meet the needs of the new increased audience size (nearly 10,000 staff) based over a very large, mainly rural, geographical patch.  The L&D team soon realised that to avoid people travelling miles for training, they would need a new LMS that better suited their needs.

Totara has revolutionised the way we deliver training and Chambury Learning Solutions’ flexible approach has enabled us to work with them to implement an LMS which is both easy to use and meets all our requirements.

– Steph Wild, Learning Technologies Lead Facilitator, York Hospital

The Solution

York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust chose Totara Learn as a suitable solution and Chambury Learning Solutions won a competitive tendering process. They knew that it would scale easily with the organisation, and that it was a flexible enough choice to keep up with the changing requirements of an NHS Trust.

The LMS, named Learning Hub, was initially designed to be used for all mandatory learning and IT training.

Some of the key Totara Learn features and functionality implemented for this project included programs and certifications, a course catalogue comprising both mandatory and non-mandatory content, SCORM e-learning content, seminars, YouTube videos, quizzes and checklists, making this a comprehensive solution. Topics covered now include health and safety, conflict resolution, safeguarding adults and children, medical device training, clinical-based training, HR courses, IT training and clinical systems.

There are also links to courses available via e-Learning for Healthcare which enables seamless access between both platforms. Data is then automatically recorded on both systems to reduce learning admin.

Users access the platform either by single sign-on and manual sign-on (depending on the user type).

The platform was also set up to support nurse revalidation. In the UK, all nurses must register with the Nursing & Midwifery Council. To do this, they must provide evidence of CPD, practice hours and reflective practice every three years in order to renew their membership.

Chambury Learning Solutions created a toolkit to enable nurses and midwives to store this information on logs, print it out and submit it easily, replacing their previous time-consuming system of collecting portfolios of work manually.

As well as this, York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust opted to set up performance management within the LMS. They worked with Chambury Learning Solutions to create a ‘development zone’ within Totara Learn, which is a series of dashboards linking to relevant courses, self-development information, links to sources of funding and more, all to help employees take more control over their own professional development.

An appraisal template also helps managers keep all training and performance data on a single system for easier user data management. The annual appraisal is set up as a required task in Totara Learn, with users and their managers receiving reminders to complete their part of the form in time.

Having recently undertaken training as a scout leader and in discussion with friends working in the private sector, I now greatly appreciate the ease and convenience of learning hub. – Learner

The Results

York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is delighted with its Totara Learn platform by Chambury Learning Solutions. They are particularly happy with the flexibility of both the LMS itself and the Chambury team, as well as the sharing of knowledge between themselves and other Chambury customers as part of Totara’s collaborative, open source model.

The NHS has a lot of different IT systems, but the Trust liked that they could just turn Learning Hub on and it worked without needing to do lots of staff training.

There are currently 686 courses, 274 programs and 37 certifications active on Learning Hub, with an average of 9,222 course completions per month for the first six months of 2018 (on average 5,600 of these were ‘required learning’).

Learning Hub has also saved the Trust a significant amount of money – over £100,000 a year, owing to the combination of e-learning courses, certifications and programs available via Totara Learn.

Using Totara has enabled us to transform the way learning is delivered within this organisation – System Admin

Very easy to use, straight forward. – Manager

It is a great system – really useful to have all S&M training in one place and not have to remember different sites and passwords. – Consultant

I think this is SO much better with the email prompts for when you need to update and complete the training. The 6 weeks and 2 weeks ‘warnings’ work well. – Learner