Solved: Track your NHS Staff Competency Data Across Trusts.

Clinical staff in the NHS move across Trusts, but issues with data storage make it difficult for them to take their competency data with them. We show you how to solve that problem.

If you work in an NHS trust in L&D, chances are you work closely (or have previously) with ESR Oracle.

This LMS and HR tool allows NHS Trusts to take better control of their data and digitise it in one central location.

But ESR has its challenges too.

In this blog, we’ll look at:

• What a compliance record is
• What CSTF is
• Why is it difficult to track compliance across Trusts
• How to track CSTF across NHS Trusts

Let’s get started.

What is a compliance record?

A compliance record is the process of getting your staff certified in statutory and mandatory training designated by your regulatory body.

In the healthcare sector this could be rules set out by the CQC, or it could include regulations specific to your Trust.  

Obtaining and maintaining your compliance record is a key challenge for learning and development professionals in the healthcare sector for a few reasons:

1. Staff are time-poor, so training takes a back foot to everyday tasks
2. Compliance training is lengthy and repeated, but the value isn’t always seen by those taking the training
3. Given the volume of staff, it becomes a highly administrative task to manage and record compliance 

With a huge focus on record management and compliance rate, L&D professionals are under pressure to get staff compliant via the quickest and most engaging route.

What is CSTF?

The Core Skills Training Framework are 11 core competencies that have been designed to cover minimum learning outcomes for clinical staff.

These competencies are:

• Equality, diversity and human rights
• Fire safety
• Health, safety and welfare
• Infection prevention and control
• Information governance and data security
• Moving and handling
• NHS conflict resolution
• Preventing radicalisation
• Safeguarding adults
• Safeguarding children
• *Violence and aggression (Wales only)

Signing up to CSTF allows you to centralise your competencies and gives you a solid base to work off of.

Employers that align their statutory and mandatory training can rest easy knowing that staff are receiving high-quality learning and that they are being compliant with CQC guidelines.

💡 Note

It’s not just NHS staff that can sign up to CSTF. It can be used by any healthcare employer including NHS, independent and voluntary providers.

Why is it difficult to track compliance across NHS Trusts?

Ordinarily, a Trust would create a bank of learning content for their own list of competencies.

Staff members would complete this content and become compliant.

But, let’s say one staff member decided to leave and move to another Trust.

The first issue is that this new Trust will likely be using a different set of competencies.

The second issue is that they won’t have any access of visibility of the competency training this employee has completed, even if it was recent.

This means more time wasted repeating compliance training that could be better spent on onboarding or on-the-job training.

So, how do we solve this problem?

How to track competency data across trusts

We built a CSTF interface that opens the gates to data exchange for competency data creating a two-way journey ESR to Totara to ESR.

A few LMS suppliers, Think Learning included, built an interface for this which works like this:

ESR sends mandatory ‘Core Skills Training Framework’ (CSTF) competency records to the client’s LMS, based on each employee’s competency profile in ESR.

These competencies are mapped in the LMS to courses or certifications.

Lastly, learners complete learning in the LMS, and if it’s mapped to ESR CSTF competencies, it travels back into ESR and updates competency profiles there.

This means that Trusts have much better data, and they can easily push and pull data between Trusts as long as they are signed up for CSTF.

The benefits of moving your competency data in this way include:

• Being able to auto-transfer compliance data into Think (or your chosen LMS) for new starters from their previous Trust
• Keep ESR competencies up to date based on completions of training in the LMS
• Send employees to their next Trust with an up-to-date compliance record.

This allows NHS employees to create a skills passport and works to support the NHS goal of ‘Enabling Staff Movements’.

To get access to CSTF all you need to do is:

• Subscribe to their core competencies
• Complete their mapping tool
• Submit a Declaration of Alignment

Once you’ve done this, you can then use the Core Skills Training Framework competencies in your ESR.

🚀 Pro Tip

Think has successfully supported 20+ NHS Trusts to migrate onto CSTF, a number that’s growing. As more Trusts enable CSTF, the ease of competency data transfer will improve.

Save a data headache with CSTF

Subscribing to CSTF provides you with the reassurance that your statutory and mandatory training hits the nationally agreed benchmark standard so that you can stay compliant with the CQC.

Book a demo with us to see our CSTF interface and how easy it is to push and pull key competency data in and out of ESR and your LMS.