NES digital responds to Covid-19 with dedicated Turas learn site
The Turas Learn Covid-19 site, dedicated to Covid-19 specific learning resources, is one of NES's key contributions to NHSScotland’s pandemic response.
NES recognised early on that there was an urgent need for all health and social care staff to quickly have access to the most up-to-date education, knowledge and skills to help them deal with the crisis.
There was also a need to rapidly develop learning resources to support staff caring for patients with Covid-19. Many of these staff were moving from their normal place of work or speciality to care for Covid-19 patients so had to upskill quickly.
It was recognised early on that a new site on Turas Learn, hosting all the relevant resources aimed at a multidisciplinary audience, was the best solution.
Turas Learn is NES's platform for learning and support resources; providing NHSScotland health and social care staff with access to learning and practice support resources produced by NES. Developed in-house, using agile methodology, NES digital teams had the tools and culture to quickly adapt from what they were working on pre-Covid, to focus on this.
The project involved working across NES, with all directorates and workstreams, to develop and populate learning resources for all groups of staff across the NHS - to help them do their job safely and with the knowledge required to deal with the unprecedented situation.
As the content was developed and added, the need for additional sites became apparent. As these were developed, they were all accessed via the main site - ensuring a consistent journey for learners.
Most resources are available without signing in. But, for eLearning modules, it is necessary to register as the platform needs to be able to track the use of modules to record in the individuals learning record.
The developers added a prominent link in the header of the Turas platform to make it easy for people to access the site.
Professor Adam Hill, Postgraduate Dean, was part of this project from the start and was responsible for clinical content for medics. He said:
“It was vital that we communicated the right resources and training to the right people, quickly and easily. NES’s digital team worked incredibly hard to deliver this project, from inception to launch. The site was an effective solution to a real need, and had a positive impact on the ability of medics and others to deal effectively with this crisis.”
Lynn Caldwell led the team who delivered the project. She added:
“As an agile team, we are set up to shift our focus as organisational priorities change. This has never been more important than with this project. We were able to, almost overnight, reallocate the required resource to working to define the need, and design and deliver a solution. It was incredibly satisfying to monitor the analytics and see in real time that the resource was being used and having an impact on the front line.
In the peak month of April we had 79,727 users access the site.
September, 18 2020