About East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust provides healthcare services through five hospital sites and multiple community facilities in the heart of the North West of England. The organisation’s 7,000 staff treats nearly 750,000 patients a year, maintaining modern facilities and nearly 1,000 patient beds.
The Challenge
With the NMC Revalidation deadline looming in Summer 2015 East Lancashire Hospitals were looking at how they could support their staff to collate online portfolios to allow them to produce the required evidence for meetings with their confirmers and successfully complete their personal revalidation every 3 years ready for the national rollout from the NMC in April 2016..
The overall objective was to enable their nurse and midwife populations to regularly check on the status of their portfolio, be proactive in the collation of evidence, and confident in the provision of evidence when they meet with their confirmer.
The toolkit aimed to make this as easy as possible so staff can revalidate effectively, managers can monitor their staff’s progress to ensure everyone is participating in revalidation in the required period, and so staff can maintain privacy around their personal journal, reflective and CPD logs.
There was also the need for the organisation to monitor the process, confidentially, and ensure that staff were progressing through the revalidation process and also have the system remind staff at regular intervals on their commitments.
The Solution
We worked closely with internal focus groups to streamline the NMC revalidation process; they wanted to make the process as simple to use for their nurses and midwives with minimal ‘clicks’, enable staff to request and reflect on feedback with their peers, and have easy access to the tools they need to ensure they can revalidate effectively on time.
The toolkit would ensure that their Board can be assured that their clinical staff are practicing safely and give confidence to patients that nursing staff who treat them are checked and competent.
Chambury Learning Solutions supported the Trust to manage this process in a way that is completely user friendly and simple to use, using the powerful e-portfolio and appraisal functionality within Totara LMS along with some custom plugins that mirror the NMC processes and templates.
The custom modules replicate the NMC Revalidation templates (CPD Log, Practice-Related feedback, Reflective Accounts, Practice Hours), enabling their nurse and midwife population to launch an NMC- compliant e-portfolio solution very quickly and with no training to end users.
In parallel to this we also created some bespoke dashboards for Totara that allows Nurses and Midwives, when they login, to see the necessary buttons and links that allow them to navigate to the functionality within a single click, and complete the forms in another click. Nothing is more than 2 clicks from the homepage. This dashboard is different to what other staff see upon login, creating a truly bespoke and tailored portal for nurses and midwives.
The Results
“To date the Revalidation module has been well accepted since this went live in April 2016. Productivity and efficiency won’t change because this process is regarding nurses and midwives revalidating rather than increasing productivity so this isn’t about saving money, but getting nurses and midwives to revalidate themselves. So the results will come in the form of increasing effectiveness of service to patients and knowledge that our staff are competent to practice giving patients confidence in our staff.”
Rita Ansbro, Business Support Manager
Workforce Education & Development at East Lancashire Hospitals
Nurses can now spend less time on portfolio building, the process is so simple to use it has resulted in them being able to spend more time with patients. If this saves each nurse a half hour every month then over a year using this solution it will save in excess of £250,000 in terms of time (based on mid-point band 6 qualified nurse).
About Chambury Learning
We promise to continually develop our services to meet and exceed customer expectations.
We take your requirements of a Learning Management System and support you into making your vision a reality.
All implementations include; a named Learning Consultant; UK hosting & maintenance; administrative training; deployment to your team. Also included is free access to customer conferences, workshops and focus groups.
Our extensive experience enables us to establish ourselves as a successful partner in your learning management project.
Chambury Learning commits to providing a professional, customer-focused, single point of contact for Learning Management Systems advice and support, ultimately being recognised as an excellent service provider to our customers and preferred supplier to the NHS.
We create an environment in which the customer feels that they can be open and transparent with their enquiry, that they are being listened to, making our customers feel that they are the most important part of the journey.
