Infonote designed, developed and deployed an Interactive Competency Training Portal for Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust. This organisation provides clinical care for children and young adults with disabilities. The aim for the Competency Training Portal was to ‘Enhance the training and educational experience of nurses and carers of all levels by delivering a high quality interactive on-line system’.
Project goal: Our new solution replaced a legacy system that no longer met the objectives of the client. The trust needed a solution with a greater level of autonomy and flexibility to allow the creation and upload of their own training content. That would then permit a quicker and more cost-effective expansion of the reach of the training to support the care of Children and Young Adults.
Background: In 2011, the Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust launched a Competency Training Portal to provide training and validation to carers of Children and Young Adults. While this portal fulfilled the objective of migrating training from being paper based to digital, it proved restrictive in that all the training content had to be created by the provider of the portal. This led to delays in launching new training or updating current content and increased the cost of ownership for the Trust.
As a result, the Trust’s management sought a new system that would provide the ability to create and upload content of their own choosing while maintaining full control over all administrative elements of the portal.
Our process: Initially, Infonote took time to fully evaluate the system currently in use. This early assessment allowed us to understand some of the challenges and frustrations faced by the users as well as the technical limitations of the existing infrastructure. As we looked at these limiting issues, it was critical that we also invested time to review and monitor features of the system that worked well.
Our early-stage assessment helped us to build up a picture and understand what the client would like to change about the current system and what functionality needed to be enhanced. This allowed us to clearly define a successful outcome from the client’s perspective. Throughout this process it was vital that we developed a thorough understanding of the requirements by collaborating with the key stakeholders and the superusers who would be using the system on a day-to-day basis.
From this collaborative evaluation, a detailed design specification was drawn up.
We deployed an Agile approach to the development and project management. It ensured that the client’s team remained engaged with us during the delivery of every milestone. This helped maintain the project’s momentum to meet the agreed delivery timeframe and avoided surprises at the point of completion.
As demanded by the agile concept, our approach included regular project review meetings and key show-and-tell events that highlighted the functionality as the development evolved. Any change requests were managed via a change request process visible to all parties and assessed by the project team. It limited the risk of ‘project creep’ and additional development costs for the client.
Once developed, every element of the application was rigorously tested and refined until the final version was released. Rollout began on the 26th September 2018 to a network of around 1,500 users.
Solution details: A major change from the original system was to split the application into two distinct elements:
- A full Content Management System (CMS) for the uploading, categorisation and management of media, questions and answers, and for the creation of training modules.
- A Learning Management System (LMS) to permit day-to-day users to access the training programs available and complete the associated learning modules. This portal allows the trainers to sign off those who have achieved the high standard required to provide the appropriate level of care on a patient-by-patient basis.
This system was also designed to be utilised by other trusts and organisations with similar needs, requiring the admin functionality to be capable of managing paid subscribers from other regions and sectors. This incorporated a number of administrative functions, allowing the client to manage organised training courses and subscription payments from third-party users of the solution.
Developed in ASP.Net Core 2, this responsive cloud-hosted solution provides Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust with a comprehensive CMS that allows them to easily upload media in the form of videos, audio files, images and text. These assets combine to create bespoke training modules with validation questions and answers that comprise a ‘Workbook’ to verify the user’s understanding and clinical competency in each area. A hierarchical security model ensures that users can only view or access information and data relevant to their area and role.
As a responsive web application, users can access the system from any location through a variety of devices, providing flexibility to undertake training and validation wherever they are and whatever the time of day. Automated workflow informs Trainers and Managers when training has been completed, details training outcomes and allows for interaction to provide feedback and guidance where required.
Trainers can assess, record notes, approve as competent and notify carers via the portal. A renewal and notification process sends reminders to users to safeguard and maintain the high standards required. The automation ensures that notifications are created to remind users when any re-training needs to be undertaken and escalates cases where this is not carried out.
The result: The Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust is able to manage its training content without input from any third parties. Managers and trainers can create the most suitable training materials for every aspect of every role in caring for Children and Young Adults while ensuring that this is kept up to date with all regulatory and best-practice guidance, without delay.
The trust also now has much greater visibility of who has undertaken which training modules, on what date and how this training builds into an overall competency that delivers the support for individuals in its care.
Most importantly, Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust has the confidence of knowing that Children and Young Adults in its region are receiving the highest level of care and protection.
Observations: It’s often all too easy to become complacent about the systems we use on a day-to-day basis and forgive what they don’t do or won’t allow us to achieve. The success of this project originated from Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust challenging this status quo and recognising that technology advancements mean that some legacy systems truly do become outdated.
Developing a new system from the ground up gave this Infonote client the ability to redefine its requirements, learn lessons from the use of the legacy system and take advantage of the latest technology to provide a tangible social and business benefit – and above all to provide better care for those that need it.
CTA: For more information on App development, Workflow solutions or Bespoke software development, call the Infonote team on 01858 467746 or get in touch via this website.