Training ticks all the boxes at Cwm Taf Trust

Citation

(2009), "Training ticks all the boxes at Cwm Taf Trust", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 41 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2009.03741cab.003

Training ticks all the boxes at Cwm Taf Trust

Article Type: Notes and news From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 41, Issue 3

When two former National Health Service trusts were merged to provide health care to around 330,000 people across north Glamorgan, Pontypridd and Rhondda, the new training manager had to ensure that non-clinical staff had the right skills in the right place at the right time.

“Educational pathways for professional staff are well established, but this is not necessarily true for most of the support workforce, many of whom contribute directly to patient care,” explained Helen Thomas, who heads the new Cwm Taf Trust corporate-training department. “If we were to deliver a radical improvement in skills in this area of the workforce, new training programs had to be developed that carried credit in line with the Credit Qualifications Framework for Wales as an integral element.”

The impetus to provide evidence of staff competence was reinforced by the introduction of a knowledge and skills framework (KSF) across the NHS, which links education, competence and development of staff to employment costs, improved patient care and productivity. In essence, it aims to provide an audit process to support stringent clinical and corporate-governance requirements and an opportunity for learners to have a unified record of all their learning and qualifications.

“A few years ago, we lacked robust methods and templates for quality assuring our program design and delivery, setting objectives and testing how effectively those objectives had been met and, most importantly, assessing outcomes,” explained Helen Thomas.

She enrolled on a course leading to the award of the TAP certificate in training-delivery skills, shortly before registering the corporate-training and health-and-safety teams on to the same course. Her colleague, project manager Claire Williams, also attended the training-delivery skills course.

“I was new to training and, as a process-orientated person, I appreciated the fact that the TAP learning system gave us all definite processes to follow,” said Claire Williams. “It is very frustrating to try to pick up things from a predecessor or another colleague if there is no common structure to the programs, but the templates and framework eliminated that problem because everyone adopts the same method. It makes life so much simpler and the questioning techniques were a real confidence booster in helping me to make my sessions more interactive for the learner.”

Helen Thomas commented: “People think a lot more carefully about objectives and effective teaming strategies and techniques to measure and achieve those objectives. In terms of measuring outcomes, cost reductions and delegate evaluations have certainly been favorable, but the litmus test is the fact that we can now attach credit to our courses.”

“An immediate priority following the integration of the two trusts was to ensure that our integrated partners were ‘TAP dipped’ so that the entire training team was unified, shared a common vision and operated to the same systems, processes, standards and assessments. Achieving the certificate in training-delivery skills has given even the most experienced trainers a renewed enthusiasm for delivering the highest-quality training.”

Marie Williams, Cwm Taf Trust deputy head of learning and development, who has 15 years of training experience, said: “The teaching methods delivered on the program not only encouraged you to build upon your existing skills but also offered new ways of designing and delivering training that tick all the boxes for both the learner and the trainer.”

Meanwhile, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust – one of only six mental-health trusts in the UK to have achieved an “excellent” rating for the quality of the mental-health and learning-disability services it provides – is also using the Training Foundation’s TAP learning system.

Oxleas, which covers the London boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham, uses the RiO IT system for recording, managing and retrieving patient records. The system helps the trust to achieve a standardised approach to patient care, from referrals through to discharges and communication between teams.

Responsibility for planning, organizing and delivering IT training to more than 2,000 staff across 50 sites spanning the four boroughs falls to the IT training manager, Diane Corrie, and her four-strong team. As well as delivering classroom-based training, the IT trainers regularly leave their Bexley headquarters to provide bespoke, ad hoc support to individual teams and wards across the sites.

“Some 95 percent of staff have to use the system and it is essential to their jobs, patient care and the reputation of the trust that they are able to use it proficiently,” said Diane Corrie. “We hold a huge number of patient records on the system and each patient’s care history has to be recorded accurately and meticulously so that any mental-health specialist, in hospital or in the community, can track the care time-line.”

Mental health care is stringently regulated. Reporting requirements, including waiting times, are becoming increasingly complex and regular upgrades to RiO reflect this. For Diane Corrie and her team this means continuously updating staff skills and training materials to ensure that best practice is sustained.

“Working in conjunction with our colleagues in the learning and development department, we have to ensure that all new starters – around 30 every month – receive mandatory systems training within an acceptable timescale,” she explained.

“Two to three times a year we need to train new intakes of doctors on how to use the system, often at short notice. On top of this we have to provide additional training to all system users – and that is the vast majority of staff – whenever there are upgrades, plus skill-enhancement workshops and training to address the specific learning needs of individual teams. Identifying and tackling skill gaps is essential to the reporting process.”

“In an environment where swift response to change is of the essence, the ability to standardise training design and delivery has been invaluable. What we needed was a set of generic resources – script, slides, objectives, hand-outs – for all our training courses. The course provided us with the knowledge and skills needed to upgrade our existing material, to be adaptable for the future.”

Senior IT trainer Craig Hill commented: “The course made me think and connect with the learners. It gave me confidence as a trainer and provided excellent results in raising learning standards.”

“Asking people the right questions at the right time aids the learning process because people have the opportunity to discuss what they have learned with their colleagues and are therefore more likely to remember the learning point,” explained fellow senior IT trainer Annette Martin.

A major upgrade to the system, scheduled for later this year, presents the IT training team with the challenge of ensuring that all staff are familiarised with new functions. Because of the scale of the task, a number of RiO “champions” have been elected to support training across the trust. The TAP model, both for design and delivery, will provide the framework to equip them with the necessary coaching skills.

Diane Corrie completed the training-design and development course last year. “I realized that you do not have to design each new course from scratch,” she said. “It is possible to design a complete course, give it to a trainer and then apply the same structure to any subject matter and include or exclude material. It saves so much time, as well as giving us that vital consistency across every course and with every profile of audience.”