South Staffordshire Healthcare and NHS Trust Case Study

About South Staffordshire and Shropshire

South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare provides mental health, forensic mental health, learning disability and specialist children’s services within in-patient and community settings across South Staffordshire and Shropshire.

The Challenge

There was a gradual realisation that the delivery of mandatory staff training was consuming too much time, effort and energy.

There were several clear objectives and requirements for the new approach:

• Ability to reach the Trust’s geographically remote services
• Simplification of its training needs matrix
• Releasing time for its subject matter experts to focus on improving quality rather than delivering mandatory training
• Releasing clinical time – clinicians were being asked to do more for less in the face of constant change in services
• Improving compliance levels which had plateaued at 85%
• Introducing a competency-based approach to training rather than repeating training unnecessarily
• Reducing the burden on the admin team, meaning the Trust would not have to rely on agency staff

/n/n### The Solution

The Trust first explored what other trusts were doing locally. They knew they needed to embrace the use of technology based learning more widely.

The Learning and Development team led on the commissioning of the project which started in September 2014 but this also involved numerous other stakeholder groups within the organisation including union representatives, operational partners, subject matter experts and various directors. The Trust chose a flexible range of online statutory and mandatory training courses for their 3500 existing staff and also created an induction package for new starters.

They looked at a number of different providers during the process but felt that the Virtual College solution was the best for them.

The Results

Compliance
Within just nine months of implementing the new digital learning approach with Virtual College, overall compliance levels reached 85%—a target that had previously taken over five years to achieve. In remote locations, compliance improved significantly, rising from 72% to 88% over the same period.

Productivity
The move to online training removed the need for 193 face-to-face sessions, saving 559 trainer hours. This allowed trainers to focus on specialist support and higher-level training quality. Clinical staff were also able to complete all mandatory training in just four hours, delivering a total time saving of approximately 3,087 hours for the Trust.

Cost Savings
The shift to digital learning resulted in a 50% reduction in refreshment costs and significant savings on travel and associated expenses. The learning and development team no longer needed to rely on agency staff or temporary internal support to manage administrative backlogs, easing pressure on resources.

Effective project management, combined with strong support from internal teams and Virtual College, played a key role in the success of the transition. The Trust has reported high satisfaction with the overall system and ongoing support provided.