We spoke to Claire Boba, Project Lead: Learning Technology at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to find out how her team used Think to create a better experience for learners and admin teams dealing with continuous professional development.
About Oxford University Hospitals
Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) is a world-renowned centre of clinical excellence and one of the largest NHS teaching trusts in the UK.
It is one of the UK’s largest teaching hospitals and is made up of four hospitals – the John Radcliffe Hospital (which includes the Children’s Hospital, West Wing, Eye Hospital, Heart Centre and Women’s Centre), the Churchill Hospital and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, all located in Oxford, and the Horton General Hospital in Banbury, north Oxfordshire.
The Challenge
Continuous professional development (CPD) is an important part of the development of OUH’s clinical staff.
Related: Read the complete guide to continuous professional development
It is also a key part of ensuring the Trust is delivering care in line with its visions and values. However, the processes are bound by strict budgets which they can’t over- or under-spend.
As such, the CPD team needed to be able to track who they were giving money to, how much and how often. On top of that, they needed very specific information for NHS England. This needed to evidence how the money is being spent, which providers were being used, which staff groups the money was being spent on and how close the Trust are to hitting the set budget.
OUH is a very large Trust with thousands of staff eligible for CPD Funding. As such, the team must track spend from lots of different places and given that the training is often provided by external training suppliers, it often results in a data gap.
This was resulting in a significant administrative burden for the team that often led to extensive chasing for information and inaccurate data. It also made it difficult to ensure that the right amount of budget was being spent by each department as they had little to no confidence in the data available.
Related: 9 key benefits to continuous professional development
The Solution
The OUH team reached out the Think Learning team as they were already working with us for their LMS.
They described their challenge to us, and our solution consultants came up with SkillFund.
This was going to be a central resource for the CPD team to: create budgets, plan spend early in the year, for learners to search and apply for courses and for managers and education leads to review and approve requests for CPD funding.
Claire said, “Overall, it was a really good, positive and engaging process. Think’s team, in particular Tim and Louis picked up what we needed and created something really positive for our whole organisation.”
SkillFund works as follows:
The Result
SkillFund’s dashboard has allowed the OUH team, and crucially, the education leads both divisionally and locally to better track how much has been spent and how much is left.
It’s a much cleaner and more informative interface than spreadsheets and the data is live offering one central source of truth.
It enables both learners and managers to track the progress of funding requests in real time with many automated notifications, providing total transparency to all involved.
Claire added, “One of the major benefits of SkillFund is having all of the information that NHS England ask us for in the quarterly returns available in one download. It makes it really easy to provide what they need within the deadlines they provide.”
“We know everything from what provider, staff group, quarter, course and so on. It’s really easy to export it and send it out.”
Now, the team has a central hub of courses, that they can add to and edit, which learners can browse, just as they do for their normal LMS courses. This also allows them to have better control of the quality of training learners complete, as they can ensure they’re recommending the best providers.
So far, nearly 4,000 fully trackable CPD application forms have been created by learners and directed to the right people for sign-off with automated notifications to the relevant stakeholders.
£1.8m of traceable planned spend has gone through SkillFund, all of which has been reviewable by the various budget holders and reportable.
Learn more about SkillFund and how it can support you to deliver external training budget management.
About NCA
Serving the health and care needs of 1.2 million people across Greater Manchester with 21,000 employees, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) is one of the largest and most influential healthcare organisations in the UK. The team is committed to leadership at all levels of the organisation and prioritise leadership skills alongside clinical skills.
The challege
The Trust has faced significant cultural challenges in recent times, stemming from a number of reasons including post-covid impacts.
We knew we needed to bring about real change to organisational leadership culture at all levels, using the tools and technology available to us. Our goal was to create a stronger ecosystem as part of our culture change, a mission we called, ‘Leadership by All; Development for All’.
In order to shift from ‘hero leaders’ to high performing teams, we recognised the need to define leader responsibilities and behaviours, and cascade these to all our leaders and managers through a high-impact culture change programme which we call the Accelerated Leadership Development Programme (ALDP).
With an ambitious, initial target of developing 4,000 leaders, we needed to create a solution that would support our mission and achieve results at scale and pace.
The solution
The NCA Talent & Organisational Development team have a huge amount of experience in creating effective culture change and leadership development programmes. The Accelerated Leader Development Programme and corresponding tools were designed and co-created through stakeholder engagement and robust needs analysis.
Our education expertise was enhanced by two other key ingredients: Totara’s powerful TXP toolkit and Think Learning’s consultative partnership approach; we spent lots of time collaborating with Think’s development team to create and test our tailored technology solution, which we call the Virtual Campus.
We were very familiar with blended learning theories, but Totara TXP gave us the functionality to really bring it to life in our LMS. The programme includes digital enrichment of face-to-face learning, self-directed learner controls, and high levels of learner engagement.
The programme comprises formal and assessed learning activities alongside performance and talent conversation-based processes. These elements are underpinned by reflective self-assessment, expert coaching, a collection of pledges and principles, plus a community of discussion boards with a resource library.
Pre-Event Tasks include a self-assessed ‘NCA Quest psychometric tool’, and a Quest Profile review. In addition, learners must have an up-to-date appraisal conversation and a live Personal Development Plan.
The 2-day, in-person learning event is administered, booked and managed in Virtual Campus, and culminates in a knowledge check assessment and ‘Leader Pledge’.
A key post-event task involves delegates collating work-based evidence in Virtual Campus for a regular ‘Leader Revalidation’ process. This is supported with access to digital tools and resources in Virtual Campus.
Cascaded leadership support and coaching is provided by our Organisational Development consultants.
Alongside this, sits a Totara Engage Workspace, styled as a ‘Learning Community’, blending digital and tutor-led learning activities linked from the Course page, providing learners with powerful opportunities to share and network.
We also use the ‘Learning Community’ Workspace within Totara Engage to host curated libraries of key content which help learners to refresh, develop and explore their new knowledge.
Our Totara Virtual Campus gives us a powerful, but unobtrusive platform to signpost, track, assess, and support our leaders. And it complements and enhances the work of our expert facilitators, OD consultants, coaches and mentors.
The results
Prior to kickstarting this mission, we were nervous about what impact it might have, But the results have already exceeded our expectations as we’re incredibly proud to have achieved University accreditation for our Accelerated Leader Development Programme.
A key objective was to make career development a bigger priority for our leadership teams, and we have seen a steady incremental increase in compliance of My Time appraisal and PDP conversations which is now at 75% across the NCA, an increase from an organisational post-covid rate of 52% in April 2021.
So not only is our compliance increasing, but so is our employee satisfaction as staff are having better conversations with their managers on a more regular basis. And this is reflected in our recent NHS Staff Survey results, which shows a significant improvement in the ‘We are always Learning’ metric.
Evaluation data shows us that leaders report significant positive impacts of the programme:
- Clarity about leadership responsibilities – 91% agree or strongly agree
- How to access resources and tools – 90% agree or strongly agree
- Committed to taking action following the programme – 89% agree or strongly agree
- A higher level of completed appraisals (82%) and personal development plans (75%)
In just 6 months, our team of 7 expert facilitators have put 1,800 delegates through the programme. So, we’re well on course to meet our 4,000-person target, and in fact we’re expanding that goal to 7,000 learners to include all service managers as well as people managers.
The programme began as a pilot in July 2022 and within just 4 weeks, the full programme was fully set up in our Totara Learn LMS.
In parallel with the intense work to build the Programme in Virtual Campus, we were absolutely delighted when Salford University accredited it, providing us with very valuable validation of the robustness and educational rigour of the Programme.
Creating a hub of content with Totara Engage allowed our team to save time on learning administration too. Our ‘Leader Revalidation’ is now digitally enabled at scale via the Virtual Campus and our eco-learning system offers online learning communities, self-access to resources and additional leader development including follow-on micro-sessions.
But more than all of this, this project has had a huge impact on our culture. Staff are invigorated, engaged and developing. The benefits of this will continue to be seen in the years to come.
Think Learning and Northern Care Alliance won Best Use of Blended Learning for their work on this project
About Circle Health Group
With more than 50 hospital sites and 2 million patient visits every year, Circle Health Group is the UK’s largest independent Hospital Group.
As the UK’s most patient-focused healthcare organisation, they put patients at the core of everything they do and empower our people to excel. They believe in their people, and that the best results will come from the best people caring together.
The Challenge
Circle Health are long-time users of Totara Learn. When they first created their platform, it had a heavy compliance focus. As their business evolved, they wanted to create a unified talent experience.
The goal was to place career growth alongside learning and find innovative ways to identify and maximise the amazing potential of their people, across every discipline and area of the business.
While their learning and talent team had the expertise to support the aspiration to be a learning organisation, their tools weren’t supporting that goal.
They needed a platform that allowed their tools to link to each other, to enable a holistic perspective and a technology infrastructure that worked for our people.
Working across multiple hospital and office sites meant that it was critical to provide solutions that were sufficiently standardised, whilst being flexible enough to meet the varying demands of each of their sites.
The Solution
Circle Health Group reached out to the Think Learning team, to see how our iteration of the Totara codebase, plus our other plugins, could help support their vision to create a complete talent solution.
As a long-standing, satisfied Totara customer, we already loved its holistic approach to learning, but we could also see how a person’s journey of learning could be effectively supported by the additional TXP tools within the system.
The Totara platform fulfilled those key criteria for us, providing a single, powerful solution to enable people to source and access tools for their development.
Working with Think, the Circle team incorporated the Perform and Talent suite of tools into their LMS.
This helped them deliver the 7 key elements of their employee talent journey:
Induction
The team were able to enhance our already established induction by providing bespoke onboarding routes through creatively themed programme pathways.
Mandatory training
The improved functionality and consultative support from Think Learning allowed the team to re-evaluate and streamline how they manage, track and report on their compliance-related training, which is key for their regulators.
Performance management
It was critical that there was a unified and improved process for performance management, for regulatory reporting, but equally important, to support and embed a culture of continuous development.
Circle has achieved this by providing regular check-in conversations between managers and staff, which also had to be able to hold and reflect the voice of the employee and their experience of the process.
Identification of potential talent
Highlighting talent was critical to feed into programmes to develop people for leadership and strategic roles in line with workforce planning.
Competencies
The business had hundreds of pages of documentation, in differing formats, for work-based competencies.
The use of the Totara Perform competency tool was critical to bring this work together, in a single unified place which was reportable and fed into wider learning provision.
360 feedback
The team wanted to be able to support people with a tool that enabled feedback in line with Circle Health Group’s philosophy, principles and behaviours.
They incorporated our ThinkLoop tool to better conduct and share feedback across teams.
Elegant and intuitive user experience
Given the Circle team works across multiple sites and provides a wide array of services via a large number of staff, it was important to create an accessible and intuitive experience.
We supported the team achieve this with personalised direct mail to every member of staff offering access to bespoke landing pages, providing support and resources according to their current or aspirational role.
The Results
Using the Talent Experience Platform alongside their LMS has transformed key talent metrics.
Not only that, but employee feedback has improved too.
Performance appraisal compliance has increased from 5% completion, to an incredible 95%.
From a regulatory perspective, we have evidenced clearer and improved reporting to regulators.
Induction completion rates have increased from 40% to an overall completion of 90%. This is a direct result of the bespoke nature of the induction course and its new layout; these factors have driven up the engagement rate, and more than doubled the previous completion rate.
Compliance-related training results have been much more consistent than previously (along with higher completion rates).
This is an area where Think Learning specialise, and their consultative support around the use of their enhanced TXP platform has enabled our learners to complete courses with ease, and enabled us to drive a 10% increase in mandatory training completion.
Building on the performance appraisal success, Think Learning produced a bespoke, interactive report that enables managers and senior leaders to identify high-performers.
As a result, participation on leadership and management courses has tripled – with a direct correlation on enrolment evidenced from outcomes of performance management conversations.
Think Learning’s expertise and partnership approach, along with the Totara TXP platform features have enabled the team to build a holistic talent infrastructure, with a technology toolkit that really works for their people.
Learn more about Circle Health Group, or see how Think Learning could help you and your L&D challenges by booking a demo with our team.
About the British Society for Rheumatology and its challenge
The expert digital learning team at the British Society for Rheumatology (BSR) offer a leading-edge, blended education programme to its clinical members. Before partnering with Think Learning, they had a custom-built, WordPress based platform.
However, it was inflexible, costly, hard to update and relied on a 3rd party to manage the system.
BSR was on the lookout for a modern, innovative solution which gave a sense of ownership and control, and that could adapt to their growing digital learning needs for their members.
The initial, swift LMS implementation saw active usage nearly doubling amongst members and students of the society, and content has been highly rated at 4.8 out of 5. Building on early success, the site is being extended to include streamlined e-commerce features and an integration with BSR’s CRM system to fully manage user accounts.
BSR’s legacy learning platform was also restrictive in the forms of content it could host. This in turn limited the growth of the organisation’s digital learning strategy, as it meant prioritising the platform’s capabilities over their learners’ needs. Partnering with Think Learning for Totara Learn changed that. By choosing to partner with us, BSR were able to:
- Create engaging learning in a timely manner.
- Improve user experience by implementing learner pathways.
- Implement reactive learning when needed, without the support of third party contractors.
- Deliver interactive virtual courses, which was essential during the COVID pandemic.
- Review and analyse user engagement by looking at various data reports.
Daisy Southam, Head of Education said, “We really wanted to up-skill ourselves in-house from a platform and product management perspective and have the ownership of the site ourselves.
“We decided to stop thinking about the LMS platform as a separate product, as we could now bring it in-house within our Education team and look after it along with everything else, complementing and building it around the program for our members.”
The Solution
At Think Learning, we are true champions of the constant evolution of learning and development technology. Things change, and it’s paramount that your learning content keeps up.
So providing BSR with the tools needed to ensure they can add to, adapt or amend their content on the fly is truly rewarding. BSR can now create and curate courses, and build pathways independently, without having to wait for the assistance of a third party. And their learners benefit from a range of learning resources, including webinars, podcasts, e-learning and virtual instructor-led-training (ILT).
What’s more, BSR can now personalise the content that each learner receives by utilising Totara Learn’s Audiences feature. By splitting the users into members and non-members, BSR can ensure the right content gets to the right learner at the right time – improving the learning experience for all.
Totara Learn is an easy-to-use, yet powerful learning platform. It has the ability to truly transform the learning functions of organisations.
As well as saving administrator time and improving learner experience, the platform encourages L&D professionals to change the way they think about learning.
The Totara Learn launch programme coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the BSR team to get creative under pressure – and they responded quickly. They needed one learning hub for all their content, including both online and face-to-face training, to provide learners with a seamless experience, no matter what.
Daisy added, “We had an incredibly short implementation time and the team at Think did so much to help us get that done. Internally, me and my team got praised that this was the first IT project that was delivered in time and within budget at the BSR. I think I couldn’t have done that without the help of the Think team. They brought expertise to the project that we just don’t have in-house.
Overall, everyone from Think that I have ever needed support from have been absolutely lovely and are always there to give me the best possible solution, so, it has been fantastic; whether it’s working on the BigBlueButton developments, learning new ways of how to do things, or data integration to our other systems – the support has been great.”
The Results
Since implementing the platform, BSR’s active user numbers have nearly doubled, and content has been highly rated. So it’s safe to say that Totara Learn has helped to transform the BSR learning services.
But this is only the beginning, Totara Learn is a truly sophisticated platform, and BSR intends to utilise it to its full potential.
They are currently building a roadmap for the next few years to see where they can take the platform – notably focusing on improved design and theming to engage BSR members, improved dashboards and more social and collaborative learning features for their members.
Our longest standing customer is the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, who has partnered with us since 2011.
The Trust have successfully been using the Think Learning compliance-focused Totara Learn system as their staff learning platform throughout this time. We sat down with Tara Kennedy, Learning Management System Manager at the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL), to get a customer’s perspective on working with Think Learning – and what the future holds for Education and Organisational Learning and Development at the Trust.
The Challenge
Tara started working at the Trust 12 years ago, when the organisation solely provided mental health and allied specialties services and had around 3,500 employees.
Since then, the Trust has doubled its employee count to over 7,000 staff, who deliver over 300 different services, such as offender care across the UK prison network, learning disability support, sexual health and addiction misuse.
And CNWL’s geographical location has also expanded in this time, now covering Milton Keynes, Surrey and Buckinghamshire, whilst catering for the prison services in Hampshire and Kent.
Despite this growth of CNWL, the Education team hasn’t increased in size. Instead, the same team are now serving double the learners, on a wider range of topics than ever before. But by partnering with Think Learning and implementing a modern LMS like Totara, CNWL has flexibility to onboard, manage administration and provide access to learning content.
Prior to adopting Totara Learn, CNWL was using a Learning Management System that catered well as a course management tool for the L&D administrators but was not fit for purpose as a self-service learning management system – a priority at that time, it was also not possible to customise the system in any way when organisational needs arose.
The Solution
Think Learning customised the learning platform to ease functionality and support available to staff, which is critical to the smooth running of any healthcare service. Particularly important as CNWL’s prioritise retaining and developing existing staff to reduce turnover, vacancy rates and the cost of backfilling clinical staff.
Partnering with Think Learning empowers CNWL to achieve their vision of “wellbeing for life”. The Trust strives to improve an individual’s quality of life through high quality healthcare and personal support; which can only be achieved with truly effective learning that ultimately improves staff behaviours.
Engaging user interface
Totara Learn provides the Trust with an engaging user experience. Creating an environment that learners truly enjoy.
Improved learner experience
Reducing the number of learner queries was a top priority for the team when sourcing a new LMS. Thankfully, Totara’s intuitive learner experience has achieved just that.
Self-service learning
Promoting a learning culture in the Trust was paramount. But due to the busy schedules of learners, it was important that learners could be self-sufficient.
The Results
The implementation of Totara Learn by Think Learning has enabled the Trust to meet a 95% compliance rate around Information Government training every year since go-live.
In addition, CNWL have moved their competency assessments to Totara’s quiz functionality, making a huge impact on compliance training and results. In fact, they’ve achieved a 94% pass rate in Statutory and Mandatory Compliance training since implementation of LDZ.
Having used Totara Learn since 2011, it’s unsurprising that the platform has undergone a number of refreshes. In 2019, LDZ had a significant upgrade to its visual appearance, driven to meet the expectations of learners, who are digital natives and frequently use a range of social networks.
Think Learning played an integral role in the refresh, implementing a new theme, layout and colours to the platform. In addition, the Trust adopted a new, workforce role-based approach to learning management. Allowing them to take a stronger talent development focus, moving away from an open directory of courses. Instead, learners are shown relevant, applicable courses for their clinical, statutory and personal development.
Since implementing Totara Learn, the Trust have been able to provide refresher training for face-to-face courses through TEL – E-Learning and electronic competency-based assessments. What’s more, when additional mandatory training topics are introduced, the Trust are now delivering through TEL where possible.
An electronic external study leave form was also implemented for staff to apply for external training directly on the system, along with actioning the approval process by the manager and panel. The status of the application is visible, and the result communicated via email directly from the system. This replaced the previous lengthy and time-consuming paper-based application process and recording on an excel spreadsheet and a large volume of emails being circulated.
Although Totara has a flexible and comprehensive reporting tool for manging compliance the Trust is developing a BI reporting tool to align trust systems for centralised reporting capability. LDZ is part of this project being undertaken by the BI team, with an automated link currently in development.
About the Trust
Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHR) run two hospitals, both with emergency departments serving clinics across North East London.
They have 6,500 clinical and non-clinical staff and volunteers caring for a diverse community of 750,000 people, making it one of the largest in the country. Services include neuroscience, cancer and acute stroke specialist care wards.
The Challenge
Since a visit by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2013, the Trust’s compliance with the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF) has been under scrutiny, along with the processes in place across the organisation.
The Trust had multiple methods for their 6,500 staff to view, manage and book training which caused confusion and placed a huge strain on HR and Learning and Development (L&D) resources at the hospitals. The L&D team were inundated with phone and email enquiries to book staff on mandatory training. There was no central policy or framework for learning and development to provide guidance to staff on requirements.
Separate Learning Management Systems (LMS) and compliance reporting systems resulted in excessive time being spent creating reports to make decisions on compliance, staff training and development.
The absence of a management hierarchy in legacy systems led to a lack of accountability and engagement for the completion of mandatory and personal development training. Training costs were escalating as a result of a high DNA rate.
The Solution
The Trust recognised the need for a user friendly LMS, that was flexible enough to be customised to healthcare specific needs. They initiated a rigorous selection process, which resulted in a partnership with Think Learning to implement and support Totara Learn.
The requirements were:
- boost efficiency and compliance
- accessible and easy-to-use
- reviews and reporting
BHR recognised Think Learning’ market-leading healthcare LMS experience, and the ability of Totara Learn to manage all of their needs including compliance training, elearning content, classroom training, nurse and midwifery revalidation, personal performance reviews centralised and line manager reporting.
Think Learning and multiple stakeholders in BHR collaborated to deliver essential improvements to the organisation’s learning technology infrastructure, as well as incorporating their end-to-end training and reporting process into Totara Learn.
A clear organisational hierarchy was developed to enable managers to support, manage and report on their teams’ learning. This management hierarchy was bulk uploaded to the LMS, known in the organisation as BEST (BHRUT Education & Staff Training).
The management hierarchy (BEST) was vital to the configuration of the Personal Performance Review created using the e-appraisals functionality in Totara Learn.
The Results
More than 4,600 clinical and non-clinical staff accessed the system in the eight weeks after go live, responding positive to the new system. Notably, staff commented on the ease of use of core learning and development processes, including viewing, managing and completing mandatory training.
What’s more, the Trust have increased their compliance rate (across all Core and Essential Training Skills) from 84% in March 2016 to 92% in November 2016. This increase has been attributed to the ease of access to training and the transparency of requirements.
The Trust have estimated a significant annual cost saving since the implementation of the Totara Learn. This saving is made up from:
- Time saving: Easy access for staff, means no time is spent managing forgotten user names etc.
- Transparent requirements: Staff know what courses they need to complete and by when. They are no longer spending time completing the wrong course or following incorrect processes.
- Increased use of eLearning: Now that it is simpler to access and complete, it is more widely utilised. Also proving beneficial for course management with more efficient course attendance administration.