The notion of increasing a patient’s quality of care and working towards improving the whole patient experience is not a new one; yet, it is one that constantly needs to be at the forefront of healthcare. Indeed, one of the main mantras in the NHS Five Year Forward View is to integrate services around the patient: “For example, a patient with cancer needs their mental health and social care coordinated around them. Patients with mental illness need their physical health addressed at the same time.” Having a patient centric approach leads to new care models; with new care models comes the question, does the workforce have the right skills in place to provide the best experience for patients?
People are your biggest asset
“Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine …” (Harvey Mackay, 1932)
Patients depend on healthcare and healthcare depends on people. In this vein, all healthcare employers whether NHS, the independent or voluntary sector, need to equip their workforce with the skills, knowledge and values needed to deliver care at the highest standards. Statutory mandatory training ensures that the right people have the right skills in place to do so. However, having training in place for staff to complete is one thing, but knowing that staff have completed their training is another.
High quality of patient care relies on appropriately trained staff
In September 2014, the learning and development team at Medway NHS foundation trust recognised that training compliance rates were poor and that the workforce had no confidence in the training data provided. Moreover, individuals were not always aware of what training they needed to do. In the same year, Bedford hospital NHS trust was undergoing reorganisation and realised it quickly needed to understand it workforce training needs, while the former Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals (now part of the Royal Free London NHS foundation trust), found compliance levels hadn’t risen for a couple of years; the hospital, which employed around 5000 staff, needed to address the level of people taking up learning opportunities and find alternative options to deliver training in a flexible way and needed to target training where it was most needed. What do these three trusts have in common? They all needed to ensure that their workforces were trained with the skills they needed to make sure patients were safe. In order to do so, staff needed to be trained with the skills to provide a high quality of patient care leading to the overall quality of patient experience.
£500k savings
Wired, developed by Skills for Health, offers a simple cost-effective way to extract and report on data from existing systems such as the Oracle Learning Management system. As a solution, these trusts worked with Wired and Skills for Health to achieve their goals. Medway NHS foundation trust compliance rating rose over 70% in a few months and reports run in specific areas made it easier to identify areas which failed to address training needs; Bedford hospital NHS foundation trust’s compliance rating rose to 75% and saved the trust money as Wired allowed to easily pinpoint specific training needed for individuals; Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals’ compliance increased from 65% in April 2012 to 85% in August 2012 leading to compliance consistently reaching 80% and higher. The trust also saved more than £500k in a year as duplicate training and operational costs were reduced.
Sam Bessant, head of learning and development at Medway NHS trusts says: “We chose Wired as our compliance reporting tool as, unlike some other tools, it made the data easily accessible to everyone.” Morevover, Rosa Lombardi, learning and education manager at Bedford hospital NHS trust says: “Patient care and safety is our highest priority, and we’ve now moved from a situation where people weren’t always sure what training they needed, to having a clear, easy to access system and an improving compliance rate.”
As we enter an age where operational costs need to be low and patient experience, along with quality of patient care, need to be high, Wired offers trusts the confidence to know that staff are up to date, compliant and have the correct skills in place to deliver the high quality of service patients deserve.
To find out more about Wired or for an informal chat on how Wired could benefit your trust, contact Linda Orru on linda.orru@skillsforhealth.org.uk / 020 7391 7179 or visit the Skills for Health website
Content on this page is produced and paid for by Skills for Health, sponsor of the Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network’s workforce development hub
