Eastern Health saves 3,000 hours of training time for student nurses a year with Totara Learn

Eastern Health is one of Melbourne’s largest metropolitan public health services, with over 50 facilities and supporting learning and development for over 9,500 staff, plus nursing, allied health and medical students.


The CHallenge

As a teaching centre, the original driver for the implementation of Eastern Health’s LMS was to create a blended learning approach for nursing students; moving theory-based learning online, whilst re-deploying nurse educators’ time into more value-added face-to-face practical sessions.

The goal was to deliver more educational services within available budgets.

The Solution

Totara Learn was chosen to support this early initiative due to its flexibility, open architecture and therefore ease of integration with other systems, and its cost effectiveness.

Androgogic was pivotal in migrating staff accounts across to the Totara Learn. They worked closely with the Eastern Health ICT team to establish and develop rule sets that ensured users' accounts were linked with appropriate learning roles. This had not previously been a consideration with account data, as it was primarily used for payroll.

What had traditionally been a two-week face-to-face orientation course was now turned into a blended course.


Over 100 SCORM courses 
have been added to the system to support orientation, including theory which used to take up 12 hours of nurse educators’ teaching time.

Totara Learn allowed managers to track their staff course completion rates in real time, providing more timely responses to the needs to the organisation. As a large health network, Eastern Health is required to show accreditors how education is being provided to its staff and who is accessing it.

In consultation with Androgogic, a number of reports were developed that the managers could easily and quickly run, clearly indicating current completion rates for all courses being run.

This has allowed individual managers to improve their staff management in terms of achieving 100% completion rates.

Results

By moving a large part of the orientation for student nurses online, up to 40 hours total of nurse educators’ time was saved every two weeks, totalling over 840 staff hours over 12 months.

It additionally released over 3,000 student hours, increasing the time students were active in the clinical space. This proved so successful that the approach was then rolled out to medical interns, and now the system supports many programmes across the network.

In moving to Totara Learn, it has allowed for the centralisation and recording of course participation to a level that had never previously been achieved at Eastern Health.

The setup of the LMS has supported Eastern Health’s processes and systems in delivering top-quality educational services, meaning that during their recent accreditation report they were described as a 'real stand out' example of the management of learning services.


"iLearn has increased our capability to create and deploy custom, role specific, courses to the staff. Additionally the system has allowed us to capture, and acknowledge, the ad-hoc and just in time learning that was occurring throughout the organisation. With assistance from Androgogic, managers have been able to create custom reports that are specific to them and the staff they are responsible for."

Scott Readett

Lead Instructional Designer, Eastern Health