A Four-Day Turnaround to Help Rapidly Deliver Essential COVID-19 Training
Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) is saving lives by developing guidelines, influencing policy, delivering courses and supporting cutting-edge research. Through education, training and research, RCUK is working towards the day when everyone in the UK has the skills they need to save a life.
LEO Learning has a long relationship with RCUK, dating back to November 2010. Among a large number of projects during the last decade, LEO Learning hosts and supports a huge Moodle-based learning platform. During the lifecycle of this platform, over £1 million has been invested in content and development costs, all to serve a network of 226,000 healthcare professionals with essential content that saves countless lives every year.
The Challenge
In the first quarter of 2020, with SARS-CoV-2 reaching Europe, resulting in the widespread transmission of the respiratory illness COVID-19 throughout the continent, governments were scrambling to engineer a rapid response to the pandemic. In the UK, two key elements of their plan (dubbed ‘Project Nightingale’) included the establishment of temporary respirator-equipped field hospitals in private exhibition spaces, and the return to work of a wave of former NHS clinicians—initially around 20,000 individuals.
Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) was approached by a key member of the team at the first of the field hospitals, NHS Nightingale at ExCeL London, with a request for resuscitation-specific digital course content. This content needed to be relevant to the NHS returners and the COVID-19 response.
RCUK contacted LEO Learning on Wednesday 25 March for assistance. Delivering the content involved several significant challenges, including:
- Immediate need: The first NHS Nightingale hospital was due to open in the week commencing March 30.
- Large volume of new users: As essentially new NHS employees, the returning clinicians were unlikely to be enrolled in existing RCUK systems. Numbers were also predicted to grow as the response evolved.
- Learning technology skill gap: Similarly, there was no guarantee that returning clinicians would be up to speed on current learning platforms and practices.
Learning Platforms, Portals and Systems
Strategic Consultancy
LXPs
The Solution
LEO Learning’s solution centered around Instilled by PeopleFluent, the new Learning Experience Platform (LXP) which launched in 2019. A six-month, 100,000+ user license for the LXP was provided to RCUK free of charge as it was identified as the most straightforward solution to the challenges faced. The following key features were pivotal in the response:
- Flexibility: The tight schedule meant that the exact format of materials, and where they were hosted, weren’t solidly defined. Instilled’s wide compatibility with media types and external resources covered all eventualities.
- Self-service login: Neither RCUK nor their systems needed to be involved in the registration process—Instilled manages logins automatically and securely, in a highly scalable fashion.
- Ease of use: Instilled offers a straightforward and familiar user experience, similar to using popular consumer web experiences such as YouTube or Netflix. It can recommend content popular with users in a similar job role, and social features allow for discussion around resources.
- Easy deployment: Instilled is easy to roll out from a systems and personnel perspective. Its systems are intuitive to use and new users can be trained rapidly.
The content itself was built using the Gomo Learning authoring tool and adapted from existing RCUK Resuscitation course material. Tweaks were made as appropriate, to make the content relevant to returning professional clinicians and COVID-19 specifically. For example, a COVID-19-specific algorithm for life support application can be downloaded via the course for reference in the field.
Gomo’s HTML5 output and cloud-based delivery ensure that the eLearning course is viewable on any device, anywhere: essential features for a response of this kind. The course—‘Adult resuscitation eLearning’—consists of five modules and was approved by RCUK’s team of clinical subject matter experts.
We contacted LEO Learning at a time of great urgency and were impressed with their suggestion of using the Instilled Learning Experience Platform (LXP) alongside the tried-and-tested Gomo authoring tool. Though we had no previous hands-on time with an LXP, we were quickly trained in how to use it and were pleased with how easily learners can get access to everything they need.
- Sultana Begum Ali, e‑Learning Product and Development Manager at Resuscitation Council UK
The Results
A joint effort from RCUK, LEO Learning, Gomo Learning and PeopleFluent staff over the weekend (March 28-29) helped ensure delivery of the course content by the morning of Monday March 30. From receiving RCUK’s brief to putting the course live, the team was able to turn around the solution in a little over four days. NHS Nightingale was formally opened at ExCeL London on Friday 3 April.
The five-module adult resuscitation eLearning course was shared with NHS returners during the same week. By Thursday 16 April, and after being made mandatory for all clinicians at Nightingale hospitals, the training had been accessed by 1,300 users.
LEO Learning will continue to support RCUK and their content as their pandemic response continues to evolve over the coming months.
