Elearning

Technology and training go hand-in-hand

With over 1.3 million employees, the NHS is the largest employer in Europe, and it has a training budget to match — nearly £4.4 billion for this year — but then it has to go a long way.

Much of the budget will be spent as part of the NHS Connecting for Health programme, making sure that an estimated 800,000 NHS staff are ready to get the best from the new technology being introduced as part of the National Programme for IT.

This programme will see the introduction of four massive new IT systems that will affect all areas of the NHS workforce — administration staff, managers, clinicians and teachers. The project’s leaders acknowledge that even the best technology is useless if people don’t want to use it. For this reason they are investing heavily in creating a training environment that makes it easy and attractive for healthcare professionals to participate, without making it seem an onerous part of their job.

Establishing basic IT competency is an obvious place to start, and thousands of NHS staff have now completed the European Computer Driving Licence qualification benchmark. This is now being replaced by the new NHS Essential IT Skills programme, which will have an added emphasis on making sure that staff understand their responsibilities in managing patient data.

This new training environment also includes the recently launched National Learning Management System (NLMS) [1], a joint initiative between the Department of Health, NHS Connecting for Health and the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) project. Relying heavily on elearning, it will make it much easier for local NHS organisations to offer education and training for their staff.

These are the big-ticket training programmes where millions are being spent, but there are lots of smaller, no-less ambitious examples of how technology is helping healthcare educators and students alike.

Interactive technology

Interactive technologies can play a vital role in transferring clinical skills or for professional development training. They can help tutors to create stimulating and rich training material and link it with real-world situations that make it more relevant, topical and practical.

Interactive whiteboards have been proven to help improve audience participation in training sessions. As well as helping to bring information to life, they empower students to express their knowledge and enable trainers to capture discussion points or answer questions in a more flexible and appropriate way.

Using data conferencing software in conjunction with interactive white boards can help introduce the elearning capability that is becoming so important in NHS training. This software can enable busy clinical specialists and other experts to participate in training sessions as guest speakers, without leaving their place of work. If individual students are unable to attend a session, or require one-to-one tuition, the data conferencing software can be used to share training materials or even deliver an individual learning programme from desktop to desktop.

Nick Bennett is the Clinical Skills Tutor at St Helens and Knowsley Hospital Trust in Merseyside. As the person responsible for managing and delivering clinical skills training at the Trust's Whiston Hospital, he deals with a whole range of local healthcare workers and students. A large proportion of his work is with undergraduates from the local medical school at Liverpool University, of whom he trains about 200 per year.

Examples of the courses he runs include intermediate and advanced life support, emergency obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatric life support and acute care skills. Delivering this training can involve a host of different tools with varying levels of technology — from flipcharts and Powerpoint presentations through to expensive medical simulators.

Earlier this year he started using a SMART Technologies Smart Board interactive whiteboard in some of his tutorials, convinced that it would give him more flexibility in the way he taught his pupils. In one particular lesson, on ECG (electrocardiogram) recognition, Nick previously used a dry wipe board, a Powerpoint presentation and a TV monitor linked to a heart rhythm simulator. He now uses the interactive whiteboard to scribble, present and display images.

He also plans to put the enhanced audio and video quality of the interactive whiteboard to use as part of a major research project he is conducting into the efficacy of human patient simulators (HPS) in clinical training. Simulators enable students to learn and test their skills in a range of recreated medical scenarios, without putting any real patients at risk. However, it is a very expensive form of training and little has been done to measure the benefit for recipients. Nick hopes to video students using HPS training and then play the clips back to them on the interactive whiteboard in order to evaluate their performance more thoroughly.

Although he has only been using the interactive whiteboard for a month, Nick is already clear of its benefits for educationalists and students. He is using less kit to prepare and deliver his training, saving him time. And he now has the ability to answer almost any question his students throw at him, in real time. If a student asks an awkward question during one of his Powerpoint presentations, Nick can log onto the hospital intranet via the interactive whiteboard and find the right training document, or flick on the interactive whiteboard’s scratch pad and draw a diagram.

As well as getting the benefit of better training, students are also familiarising themselves with a technology that is making inroads into other areas of healthcare. A range of organisations are now using interactive white boards to help improve the way their staff communicate and collaborate.

For example, the A&E department of Charing Cross Hospital in West London is using an interactive whiteboard to provide a single, structured display of the location and status of its patients. The board has reduced the inconsistencies associated with the previous system, which saw patient data duplicated on a dry wipe board and a PC-based system. It is also saving up to 20 minutes per patient in administration time, freeing up staff to concentrate on clinical duties.

Nick is now installing a second interactive whiteboard in a new education room at Whiston Hospital and is planning an open day for other tutors where he will demonstrate the way interactive white boards can be used to teach clinical skills.

A key part of any ongoing education programme is evaluation. Training is best evaluated in real-time — there is no point finding out after a session has finished that half of your students didn’t understand a key topic. New audience response technology can help trainers review, confirm and check people’s understanding of any medical briefing or training input. Because it works in real time, it can even enable a tutor to match the pace of their presentation to their pupils’ needs.

Nick Bennett is looking at using the TurningPoint audience response handset from Turning Technologies, which enables trainees to press a button on a keypad to give a particular type of feedback. He gives pre- and post-evaluation forms to most students, and it can take him up to a day to process the paper forms. He believes that getting this feedback in real-time, electronically, would save him time and improve training standards.

As well as getting feedback on training, such evaluation can also play a vital role in proving the value of new teaching methods. New technology can be intimidating to all kinds of people, teachers or trainees, but if it can be demonstrated and shown to make a real difference to students, people like Nick will have an easier job of converting their colleagues.

Further information

1. NHS National Learning Management System
www.esrsolution.co.uk/projects/nlms/