6 Key L&D Healthcare Challenges [+ How to Solve Them].

Working in L&D in healthcare comes with its challenges. We share the key L&D healthcare challenges plus nifty ways to solve them.

Learning in healthcare is changing.

It’s traditionally thought of as statutory and mandatory training, or compliance.

But it has the potential to be so much more than that.

Creating a learning culture in healthcare can support teams to grow and develop, leading to massive business and individual opportunities.

But what are the barriers in the way?

In this blog, we’ll look at:

• What L&D in healthcare is and what it looks like
• The key challenges in healthcare L&D
• How some of our NHS and healthcare clients solve these challenges

Let’s get started.

What is L&D in healthcare?

Whether its NHS or private, you’ll find a learning and development team that is creating course content, managing users’ training and delivering better learning outcomes.

Using a healthcare LMS, L&D professionals can:

• Create and host learning content
• Support better performance management
• Track and record compliance
• Deliver onboarding experiences
• And more

6 L&D challenges in healthcare

In any sector, there are going to be challenges and nuances to overcome. But the healthcare sector, in particular the NHS, has a number of difficulties in L&D.

The challenges in L&D can usually be rounded down to:

• Supporting time-poor staff
• Proving impact
• Incentivising mandatory training
• Improving employee retention
• Dealing with digital literacy
• Impacting wellbeing

Let’s look at them in more detail.

Supporting time-poor staff

Clinical staff are facing more pressure in the workplace, particularly those working in the NHS. The state of healthcare is seeing longer working shifts, more patients and less staff per shift.

With long to-do lists each day, and often urgent tasks dealing with patient safety and care, it’s no wonder that learning isn’t prioritised in healthcare.

Engaging your healthcare teams in learning requires a better understanding of the time constraints they have on their working day. But how can you alleviate this pressure? And how can you prove the value of learning to the point that it’s bumped up the priority list?

Proving impact

If you’re not having an impact on your patient care and safety, then what is the point of your learning content?

When you set a new course live, the goal is to educate the user and support them to improve their skills and knowledge.

Reporting on course attendance and completion is one way to prove impact, but what about qualitative impact?

The challenge is that L&D professionals in healthcare struggle to get to this deeper impact.

How can you measure such long-lasting and nuanced changes? This is a huge obstacle as with it, you would be able to justify the impact and cost of learning.

Related: How to track the ROI of learning and training

Incentivising mandatory training

Compliance isn’t viewed as exciting or ground-breaking learning. In fact, it’s often seen as a click and tick exercise done in lieu of other, more practical work.

Related: [Free pdf] Complete guide to compliance

But the issue with statutory and mandatory training is that it can be extremely useful and beneficial to your employees. So how do you incentivize their engagement?

How can you encourage teams to more readily get involved with their own compliance and keep up to date?

🚀 Pro Tip

Circle Health revolutionized how they approached compliance, taking their compliance rate from 5 to 95%

Learn how Circle Health grew compliance rates

Improving employee retention

Employee retention is a big concern for NHS Trusts across the UK. And L&D certainly plays its role in addressing it. Staff leaver rate in the NHS has risen from 9.6% to 12.5% as of September 2022.  

How can learning and development support? As more people leave the NHS, it creates a ripple effect on the rest of the staff. More pressure, worse wellbeing, less time for learning.

Related: Guide to NHS performance management

Dealing with digital literacy

Technology is always advancing, and more and more is on the horizon in the L&D world. Artificial intelligence has been the buzzword for the last few years, but how will LMS and learning recipients deal with this?

Not everyone has the same level of technical literacy, meaning that using new tools, or getting the most out of existing ones, isn’t as easy for everyone.

Impacting wellbeing

With the mounting pressure, increasing patient numbers and reducing staff numbers, it’s no surprise that wellbeing is a cause for concern in the NHS.

Supporting the welfare of your people across healthcare is vital. Not only does it mean they have a better working environment, it also impacts the physical and mental wellbeing of your employees.

The 2022 NHS Annual staff survey reported that 45% of staff report feeling unwell as the result of work-related stress.

So how can L&D impact this wellbeing?

How our customers solve these key challenges

We support a large number of healthcare providers from the NHS to private healthcare with their learning and performance solutions.

Through our tools and features, they are able to create seamless solutions to some of the challenges shared above.

Here’s how:

Prove your value

Creating new learning content needs to solve a solution and deliver to a real need. But L&D professionals still struggle to quantify their impact. And with mounting pressure in healthcare, it’s more important than ever to be able to demonstrate that the work we do in L&D has a direct and measurable impact on patient outcomes, experience and safety.

Will Bladon, Digital Skills Lead at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, shares how he addresses this.

“Measuring learning impact is hard to do, which is why a lot of people tend not to. Of course, there is data you can share around numbers of courses completed, but that doesn’t really tell you anything about impact, simply the number of people who clicked on a module. Quantitative and qualitative data about the long term impacts of training on behaviour changes and outcomes is far more meaningful, and it is that that we as L&D professionals need to be capturing”.

“Previously, we would be asked to make a course and just make it. But now, we take the topic lead through a process where we ask them to present their problem, and we work with them to create a solution. This means that we can bake in goals from the beginning as we know what we’re trying to change. This also allows the best solution for the problem to be created – whether that is a training intervention or not.

“It keeps impact a key part of the discussion from the offset, and it allows us to make impact measurement a key factor. Now for example, we can measure a skill before and after a course to see how it’s changed. Or, we’ll ask for feedback from colleagues on how working behaviours and skills have changed since course completion.

“This method gives us much more evidence on our impact, but ensures the interventions made, do actually lead to change, and if not, allows us to go back and refine the approach.”

Having more quantifiable impact can help you promote your courses too. When learners can see the impact that a course will have on their job performance or their progression, they’re likely to be more engaged.

Engage your users on their teams

Everyone learns differently, and everyone responds in different ways to content.

Creating a user-centric learning platform needs to be the cornerstone of your L&D goals.

Encouraging compliance isn’t easy, but it can be easier with the right tools in place.

Remind users

One easy way to encourage compliance is to remind your learners. A lot of the time, it goes to the bottom of a long to-do list and is forgotten about. But with our ThinkNudge tool, you can easily set automatic reminders via email and text message.

Plus, with the right reporting, managers can have better visibility of their team’s compliance and take the appropriate action.

Put compliance at the heart of the LMS

Using a stuffy LMS means you might struggle to edit your homepage or your dashboard.

With a Think Learning LMS, you can create your own pages with easy-to-use block setting. That means you can put personalised compliance data on the right dashboards to keep it front of mind for learners.

Let learners learn on their terms  

Some of your learners will like written content, others video, or even audio.

Creating content across different mediums means that they can find what will resonate best with them.

We’ve equipped many of our customers with filter capabilities so that learners can find courses based on:

• Topic
• Duration
• Rating
• Medium

Smarter compliance

Some of our customers have taken a revolutionary route when it comes to compliance.

Related: Solved: how to track competency data across Trusts using CSTF

We’ve created two powerful solutions to better compliance:

CSTF interface

One key issue for the NHS is that workers move Trusts and lose all of their training data. We’ve worked with NHS England to create our own CSTF interface to allow our NHS Trust customers easily share compliance and learning data via ESR.

It means that learning records will follow staff across Trusts, and that their learning content always stays up to date.

Compliance quizzes

Many of our customers have taken different routes when it comes to recertifying compliance.

Instead of repeating the full compliance course, some customers will test learners on their knowledge and then serve them content where their knowledge wasn’t up to scratch.

This means learners can massively reduce the amount of training that they have to go through.

Create mindful learning experiences

Wellbeing is increasingly important in the NHS. As pressures mount and workers are time-strapped, L&D teams might be scratching their heads at how they can support.

Jason Kennedy, at Kings College Hospital said, “As the L&D team, our focus is on equipping staff to do the job as quickly as possible. We need to support them to use tech to get the job done, or work smarter, to help alleviate some of those pressures.”

“Offer to support wellbeing directly and indirectly. Create courses around stress and time management and how that can support mental health. Of course, it’s not a silver bullet to solving the issue, but it can give your learners the tools they need to better manage stress ahead.

“Next, be more mindful of how you engage your learners. For example, if you need to send out a reminder email about an expired qualification, you need to be mindful of the language you use.

“You need to speak to your learners like a human and understand their circumstances, so instead of “you didn’t come to a course”, you can say “we appreciate you’re busy, if you need more support completing your learning…”.

“When you’re having discussions around mandatory training, think about wellbeing, prioritisation and making sure you’re not overloading teams.”

Solve key challenges with the right LMS

A learning management system can help you solve key challenges no matter what type of healthcare organisation you work for.

From creating a personalised learning experience to showing staff support through better compliance and more mindful learning.

And you wouldn’t be alone. You’d be joining our many healthcare clients across the UK who we’ve supported with a range of obstacles.

⚙️ Note

Fun fact, over 30% of NHS workers in England currently use a Think LMS, so you’re in good company!

Learn more about Think and how our team and our tech can support you with your main objectives by booking a demo with our team.

Our experts will show you our core LMS using Totara’s basecode, as well as the extra features and plugins we’ve created for our customers.