How East Midlands Ambulance Service used its LMS to bring consistency to paramedic training

Using a Totara Learn LMS to deliver rapid improvements to consistency and compliance levels when it comes to delivering paramedic training.

By its own admission, East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EMAS) was a late adopter of online learning. As recently as 2014 it had no e-learning programme at all available, and only since EMAS started working with us in 2018 has it had an online platform capable of tracking which employees have completed specific training courses.

The absence of a centralised system to deploy, track, apply and create learning had created a disjointed and inconsistent training system. That extended to frontline medical staff, with paramedics having received different types of training depending on how long they had been employed and their level of engagement with the previous training regime given how hard it had been to monitor completions.

As a result of this, developing consistent paramedic training and bringing all paramedics to the same skill level was a key priority for the Totara Learn learning management system we worked with EMAS to create.

Consistent training standards

Once the new LMS launched, EMAS was immediately able to create a dynamic audience selecting all paramedics from the organisation’s 5,000 staff. A set of mandatory training courses was applied to all paramedics to ensure that each had been trained to identical standards.

Within two years, all EMAS paramedics had completed the new set of mandatory courses. As a result, the organisation knew and could easily demonstrate that all paramedics were trained to the same level — an immediate boost for compliance levels and a big efficiency saving for audits and reporting.

The new LMS makes it easy to maintain these standards and compliance levels by automating enrolment to refresher courses and new training when needed. As a result, ease of access to training is greatly improved — paramedics are now immediately assigned training they need to undertake rather than having to seek it out.

And that ease of access is only furthered by the fact that all theory aspects of the training can now be completed online, at any time and on any device. Time spent waiting at hospital with patients or stationed at remote locations can now be put to good use. Previously, an employee would have travelled to a training centre for all paramedic training, which would have amounted to a 160-mile round trip in some cases.

Modernise your organisation’s training

If you need to bring greater consistency to an aspect of your training or you’re wrestling with an outdated way of monitoring learning and development, fill out the form below for a chat about how we can help.

Tags