BMI Healthcare’s learning management portal, BMiLearn, has been named as a finalist in the best use of technology category at this year’s prestigious CIPD People Management Awards.
The annual awards recognise and celebrate outstanding achievements in people management and development and the impact these have on business success.
The BMiLearn portal ensures that learner experience, especially in mandatory training assignments, is focused and tracked effectively across BMI Healthcare’s network of UK hospitals and corporate sites. The solution, a learning management portal that integrates offline and online training in one centralised offering, had to overcome a number of inefficiencies in how training courses and actions were assigned and how individual employees training records and performance were recorded and tracked. Before the implementation of BMiLearn, mandatory training was assigned by job description rather than by roles and responsibilities. Training was also designated by individual sites leading to inconsistencies, and audit reports were compiled manually, which was time consuming.
To improve targeting and tracking BMI Healthcare worked with Kineo to develop BMiLearn and significantly improve functionality for Totara, the open source leaning management system. The new functionality, which is now being adopted by other users, allowed for the integration of a training matrix to outline which courses are mandatory, how often they need to be taken, and who they are allocated to which is based on an individual’s role and responsibility. Improvements were also made in the frequency at which mandatory courses were assigned to users and the notification process around when upcoming training needed to be completed or renewed.
In addition, significant improvements have been made to the reporting functionality allowing external agencies, such as the Care Quality Commission, to see in real-time the compliance rate for the business, region, hospital, department, and individual.
The innovation, made through BMiLearn, has more than paid for itself in year one alone by driving up compliance rates.
Keith Luxon, people director at BMI Healthcare, said: “BMiLearn, and the creation of the Mandatory Training Matrix, allows us to deliver a full suite of online training specifically and uniquely targeted to every individual’s needs, role and responsibility. This allows us to maximise the efficiency of the training we provide to ensure productivity while achieving compliance.”
He added: “Staff training is at the heart of our commitment to being serious about health and passionate about care. Having such a diverse workforce, from nurses and physiotherapists to porters and restaurant teams, we needed a solution that recognises diversity and was capable of delivering the right training, to the right person, at the right time. BMiLearn is an investment, not only in technology, but in our teams and individuals, and we are very proud to have received this recognition from the CIPD People Management Awards.”
BMiLearn has improved levels of staff satisfaction around training, improved the compliance rate for training, and provided every employee with access to training and training resources that help them develop their abilities and careers.
Sue Middlehurst, BMI Healthcare project lead, said: “Having a workforce split across multiple sites in multiple locations means that in the past it was difficult to track the level at which staff were completing mandatory training. The new solution allows us to look at compliance in granular detail to ensure all staff complete the training required to carry out their individual role and grow their skills and competencies.”
Other healthcare products and services among the finalists include HC One, a company that specialises in dementia, nursing, residential and specialist care provision, which is shortlisted in the HR/L&D Team of the Year category; and Birmingham Children’s Hospital, East Cheshire NHS Trust, and Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which are all hoping to pick up the gong for HR/L&D Team of The Year (Public Sector) .
In the People category, the shortlist for the Michael Kelly Outstanding Student Award (Advanced Level) includes Chara Balasubramaniam of Bayer Healthcare and Rebecca Webber of Health Education East of England. Finalists for the HR/L&D Professional of the Year title include Amy Henderson, head of HR and people and organisational development at Abbott Laboratories; Alison Innes-Farquhar, head of people and organisational development at HC-One; and Andrew Jones, deputy director of HR and workforce at East Cheshire NHS Trust.
In the Best Diversity Initiative category, finalists include AXA PPP Healthcare; while Mersey Care NHS Trust is shortlisted in the Best Employee Relations Initiative class. And Arup and the Royal College of Nursing have been successful in the Best Health and Wellbeing Initiative category.
The BMiLearn project team will be honoured as finalists at the CIPD People Management Awards on 30 September.
Click here to see the shortlist in full.
