In October 2003 Atos Healthcare was awarded a five-year contract to design, implement and manage an electronic booking service called Choose and Book, delivered through NHS Connecting for Health. Choose and Book revolutionises the old booking system by allowing patients to choose their initial hospital or clinic appointment and book it during their appointment with their GP if they wish, or later on the phone or via the Internet.
Business Challenges
An integral component of our challenge was to develop on-site training courses that effectively explained and promoted the benefits of the new Choose and Book system to doctors, nursing and administrative staff working in hundreds of hospitals and GP practices in the London, Southern, North West & West Midlands NHS regional clusters. The training courses had to be created and delivered within strict timescale and budget limitations. Just as importantly, they had to demonstrate successful understanding of the new system in order to maximise the take-up of Choose and Book across all three regional clusters.
Solution
The sheer scale of the project required a substantial number of trainers, peaking at 150 during the most intense phase. And each and every trainer had to be thoroughly versed in the Choose and Book IT application so that they could deliver a range of courses to suit the requirements of the different staff roles accessing the system.
Our solution was presented to Strategic Health Authorities as a ‘catalogue of services’ from which individual courses could easily be ordered. The result was a ‘menu’ of relevant training services that maximised cost-effectiveness whilst also offering bespoke solutions for each regional cluster. The scope of the training included a wide range of courses from new-user training to more detailed, role specific sessions.
We quickly established a Programme Management Office located in each cluster; key stakeholders were identified and communication strategies devised. Training sessions were scheduled with NHS staff on a one-to-one or group basis as appropriate. We worked with both end-users and nominated NHS trainers, who were coached and mentored by our Training Services Team, and who continued the training process after completion of the programme.
We created a training resource database so that requests could be reviewed, assessed, and then assigned to a training resource. A six-week plan of events was installed in the database in order to maximise trainer utilisation. And by also carefully monitoring the Choose and Book technology roll-out we ensured training was offered on a ‘just-in-time’ basis.
Benefits
We delivered the programme to timescale and budget, training over 30,000 NHS employees. Our evaluation indicates that effective scheduling achieved a 93% trainer utilisation rate, ensuring a high return on project investment.
Post-campaign evaluation shows that the courses were highly effective in ensuring the successful take-up of the newly launched Choose and Book system.
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