Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust

Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust employs around 3500 staff who are responsible for delivering a wide range of community health services across Hertfordshire and are one of the new generations of community health service Trusts in the NHS. Both organisations recognise the importance of the support their staff have in achieving their aims and objectives and have a comprehensive workforce development plan in place to underpin this approach.

The organisation are currently using AT-Learning as their Learning Management System (LMS) to manage the provision of learning and development across all staff, including locally produced e-learning activities.

Think…Architect was purchased as a cost effective tool that would empower the production of local e-learning content that is SCORM 1.2 (Oracle Learning Management (OLM) system) and SCORM 2004 (AT-Learning) compatible.

Since the purchase of Think…Architect, the tool has been piloted by the Learning and Development administrator, who has successfully converted content produced by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in PowerPoint, into e-learning objects. Assessments have also been created using the Learning Object Manager (LOM) and the e-learning activities have been deployed and made available to staff via AT-Learning, which has then been used to track and report on completion. The e-learning activities created to date include: Stop Smoking; Assessing Your Work Station; Introduction to Clinical Audit; Diabetes module; Fire Update; Infection Control (including hand hygiene, mandatory update, clostridium difficile and pandemic influenza); and Sharps Awareness.

The team are currently looking at integrating a feedback mechanism to evaluate the e-learning that has been created locally. Any technical support that is required  by staff on how to complete activities is being managed by the learning and development team and staff who don’t favour e-learning are being supported by facilitated / trainer led sessions to ease the transition to e-learning for staff who aren’t comfortable with computers.

Following the initial day of technical training provided by Think Associates, no additional training or implementation support has been required. Technical support is provided directly from Hunterstone who have responded quickly. However, as the organisation operates across multiple sites there have been challenges deploying e-learning due to inconsistent software provision, for example not having Flash installed on certain computers. Moving forwards this could be addressed by revisiting the content design or having hardware and software configurations aligned.

The organisation perceives the principal benefit of Think…Architect has been the ability to create quickly create, cost effective e-learning activities that can be deployed to the organisations’ Learning Management System, which in turn provides staff with a single point of entry to book both classroom and e-learning activities. Staff can also really see the benefits of e-learning and are engaging in making the most of the activities currently available.

Next Steps

In the future, the organisation is potentially looking to move from AT-Learning to the OLM and will be rolling out self-service so there is a single point of entry for all learning and e-learning activities.  Local e-learning content will still be produced using Think…Architect as required and deployed to the OLM along with national content that is already available.