Health Service Executive

Summary

The Health Service Executive (HSE) is Ireland's national healthcare provider, responsible for delivering a broad range of health and social care services. To support its workforce in continuous professional development (CPD) and mandatory training, the HSE partnered with Aurion Learning to create and manage HSeLanD, the national online learning and development portal. 

Over the past 17 years, HSeLanD has evolved into a world-class learning platform, successfully meeting the changing learning needs of healthcare professionals across Ireland, helping to drive significant cost savings and operational efficiencies for the HSE.

About HSE

As the main national healthcare body in Ireland, the HSE delivers healthcare services to millions of people through hospitals, clinics and community-based care.

The Challenge

With a workforce of over 150,000 health and social care professionals, the HSE required a scalable digital learning solution to provide training, career development and compliance education.

The HSE relied on traditional classroom-based learning for its CPD and mandatory training initiatives. This approach was resource-intensive, difficult to scale and unable to meet the demands of a geographically dispersed workforce throughout Ireland.

The HSE needed a flexible, accessible and cost-effective learning solution that could support the digital transformation of classroom learning, ensure compliance with national training initiatives and easily adapt to emerging healthcare challenges.

The Objective

The primary goal was to create a comprehensive online learning environment that would offer seamless access to high-quality training for all HSE health and social care professionals and support staff.

The solution needed to support blended learning, professional development and compliance training while enabling efficient management and reporting of learning activities.

Additionally, it was crucial that the new learning platform could scale to accommodate the evolving learning needs of healthcare professionals across Ireland. The HSE had a growing user base and increasing learning and development requirements, therefore any solution needed to provide easy accessibility for their 100,000+ workforce.

Over 700 bespoke eLearning modules and resources have been developed to date for the platform, including national training initiatives such as Infection Prevention & Control, GDPR, Risk Management and Child Safeguarding.

To facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across the HSE between multidisciplinary groups, Collaborative Learning Hubs were introduced, offering content and resources in specialist areas. These included the ‘Nursing & Midwifery Hub’ and ‘Change Hub’, which help support specific national initiatives.

The HSeLanD platform also includes digital learning tools such as the Discovery Zone, enabling learning content management to support local, peer learning, and interactive Personal Development Planning (PDP) features to support individual career growth.

The Approach

Aurion Learning has worked closely with the HSE since 2007 to implement and develop HSeLanD, using a structured and iterative approach. The project began with the deployment and integration of the LMS within the portal, ensuring seamless access to third-party, ready-made learning content and e-reference materials.

Content transformation was a major focus, with Aurion Learning’s team working closely with the HSE’s content teams (Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and classroom trainers) to redesign and develop these into engaging, interactive eLearning content.

To ensure governance and compliance across the HSE, national protocols and best practices were established for digital learning, covering the transformation of classroom-based and blended learning. A comprehensive HSeLanD Governance Guidelines document was developed to assist administrators and content creators on best practices for developing and delivering new digital learning content across HSeLanD in a robust, simple and timely way.

Aurion Learning works continuously with the HSE to develop and enhance the system, ensuring it successfully aligns with their HR strategy and the HSE’s/Department of Health’s healthcare improvement plan, Sláintecare, to keep pace with changing healthcare training demands. 

To ensure ongoing success, Aurion Learning also provides user support to the HSE, including a dedicated Programme Manager and a structured ticketing system for issue resolution and technical support, helping to keep HSeLanD fully functional and optimised for all users.

In response to increased demand since launch in 2007, Aurion Learning has also worked closely with the HSE to optimise system capacity, supporting access for over 170,000 registered users, making the platform one of Ireland’s most heavily utilised digital learning platforms.

The Results

HSeLanD has significantly transformed the learning and development offering for the HSE. The platform has more than 120,000 active learners accessing training resources regularly.

More than 300,000 logins are recorded on the platform each year, with almost 1.5 million course completions and 57,000 new registrations taking place, highlighting its key role in delivering professional development across the HSE.

The shift from traditional classroom-based training to digital learning has led to significant annual cost savings. HSeLanD has become the national standard for healthcare learning in Ireland, underpinning key training programmes and compliance initiatives.

Awards

The platform's success has been widely recognised, earning multiple awards including:

• CIPD Ireland HR Awards – Best Use of Technology/Analytics in People Management, 2019
• NetDimensions NextSteps Excellence Awards – Best LMS Implementation, 2017
• HR Leadership & Management Awards – Most Innovative Use of Technology, 2017
• Brandon Hall Learning Gold Award – Best Learning Team, 2016
• Brandon Hall Learning Bronze Award – Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation, 2016.