NHS Education for Scotland

Challenge

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) is a Special Health Board which is responsible for the education and training of the healthcare workforce in Scotland.

The Scottish Infection Prevention and Control Education Pathway (SIPCEP) provides a national approach to infection prevention and control.

NES was commissioned by SIPCEP to develop a suite of eLearning modules and associated learning materials to support Scottish health and social care staff and students to continuously improve their knowledge and skills around infection prevention and control as part of their role.

NES wanted a solution that would:

• Provide a flexible learning pathway where health and social care staff could find learning materials easily
• Appeal to a diverse workforce
• Integrate all existing resources into the pathway and incorporate small online learning unit

Solution

The NES team partnered with Aurion Learning to design and develop a suite of tools and online learning resources across 19 modules with topics including Chain of Infection, Hand Hygiene and Management of Care Equipment.
We also facilitated a series of content planning workshops to explore the core teaching areas of each module whilst supporting NES with instructional design advice.

SIPCEP is made up of three learning layers:

• Foundation: covers all 10 Standard Infection Control Precautions and introductory infection prevention control topics in 20-30 minute modules
• Intermediate: covers the application of knowledge in practice and motivation of staff. The intermediate layer provides resources to enhance ‘clinical’ or ‘practical’ skills, reinforce decision making and clinical reasoning and develop interpersonal and leadership skills.
• Improvement: is designed to give learners a deeper level of knowledge and skills with regards to infection prevention and control

The SIPCEP eLearning pathway has been developed to be relevant to all Scottish health and social care staff and students with a range of scenarios and activities created to ensure learning is applicable to all staff roles.

Learners work with their line manager to create personalised learning pathways that are relevant to their role, providing flexible, relevant and engaging learning at the time of need.

A wide range of content and interactivity types were developed for the SIPCEP programme including:

• Scenarios
• Bespoke imagery
• Video-based interviews and role-plays
• Performance support aids
• Formative assessments
• Individual and team-based learning activities

The eLearning pathway was deployed to NHS Education for Scotland’s learning platform with a range of downloadable job aids and offline versions of the learning materials developed for use in classroom sessions.

Results

In the first year of the launch of SIPCEP, 50,000 NHS Scotland staff from 555 different job roles enrolled with an additional 7,000 college and university students enrolling in SIPCEP elearning modules. 

Statistics for 2019 are currently being compiled however first-look statistics are proving to be even more impressive.

SIPCEP has been extremely well received within the NHS Scotland community.