Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (GMMH), formerly known as Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (GMW), is a statutory body which, as of January 2017, brought together the expertise of GMW and Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust.
The Trust provides inpatient and community-based mental health care for people living in Bolton, the city of Manchester, Salford and Trafford and a wide range of specialist mental health and substance misuse services across Greater Manchester, the north west of England and beyond.The Trust employs around 4,750 members of staff, who deliver services from more than 130 locations. Over a 12-month period, they see in the region of 53,000 service users.
The Challenge
In 2014, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust started implementing the Paris Electronic Patient Record system (EPR) and Case Management system. Their existing LMS, the centralised NHS Oracle Learning Management system (OLM) wasn’t up to the job and they quickly identified that they needed a modern flexible LMS to roll out training of the EPR to all staff. After researching learning management systems, they turned to Chambury Learning Solutions to deploy Totara Learn.
The Solution
As Totara Learn was procured purposely for the Paris rollout, their new site was quickly deployed with a fully responsive theme and integration to Active Directory to provide single authentication and Single Sign On (SSO). This was completed within a couple of weeks of agreement to meet the local project plan.
Multiple learning elements within courses provide a truly blended experience for staff. Each Paris course contains a mix of classroom, embedded video, quizzes and SCORM activities along with interactive various downloadable resources to enrich the learner experience. Functionality was widely adopted including multiple activity types within courses, certifications and programs to create defined learning pathways. Implementation of dashboards for reporting and homepages ensured that users are faced with relevant content at all times, and ensures managers have access to relevant reporting within a click.
The Results
The Paris EPR system training was a massive success completed within the first year of deployment, and with additional learning modules added as required quickly and easily. Totara provides a central repository for all learners and trainers that is easily accessible for all GMMH geographies across the North West. The core reporting functionality allowed the department to easily identify staff who hadn’t received the appropriate training which in turn supports local Clinical Information System access policies and procedures ensuring that staff access the EPR once they have been trained, resulting in increased data integrity around patient records.
Furthermore, Totara Learn provides a consistency across training approach – all trainers used the same materials, opposed to deviating with own personal file and the core quiz functionality allows for simple assessing of system user competency.
After the Paris rollout in early 2016 the Trust then migrated their full legacy dataset, moving learning management fully from the NHS OLM to Totara Learn. Chambury were again called for help and successfully migrated all core skills legacy data from the OLM to Totara in a single day. This included the setup of the required Certifications, notifications and bespoke reports. The centralised NHS OLM LMS relied a lot on Java for basic eLearning; Totara has no need for Java; the Trust had a lot of historic software issues of staff members being unable to complete basic mandatory training (SCORM content) on the NHS OLM which is now a thing of the past and compliance has soared.
The Trust continues to use Totara for Paris training, adding new modules and learning activities as Paris is developed, mandatory training has since implemented the NMC Revalidation using Chambury’s bespoke Revalidation toolkit, and is moving forward with Appraisal in 2017.
“GMMH’s ‘Learning Hub’ [Totara] was introduced in 2015 and currently facilitates the Learning and Development needs of almost 5,000 staff. In respect of the Clinical EPR System, Paris, we have a number of e-learning materials developed within local authoring tools which bring together SCORM content and multi-media which help to supplement other methods of training delivery.The big advantage is that busy clinical staff can supplement their knowledge of the system online without having to take time out from their busy schedules to attend classroom sessions. Totara provides GMMH with the ability to quickly roll out online EPR training that compliments classroom delivery, providing an area where staff can become compliant in the use of Paris, top up their knowledge ‘as & when’ and manage classroom bookings.” – Len Rigby, Head of IM&T Systems, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust