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Cwm Taf NHS Trust in TAP
The Training Foundation
| Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, UK
2-Dec-2008 » Training Press Releases » The integration of the former North Glamorgan and Pontypridd & Rhondda NHS Trusts in April 2008 to form Cwm Taf NHS Trust brought together a full spectrum of healthcare services with the objective of providing quality, patient focused healthcare to around 330,000 people across both regions. From a training and educational perspective this means ensuring that staff have the right skills in the right place at the right time. The merger presented a number of challenges to Helen Thomas, who heads up the new Trust's Corporate Training Department. Not only did she have the cultural issue of amalgamating two training teams from the former Trusts, but also the task of ensuring a consistent, high quality
approach to the design, delivery, accreditation and evaluation of all corporate training programmes.
Helen and her team, based at the Hollies Health Centre in the North and the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in the South, are responsible for the provision of all non-clinical training and education. This means providing high quality, flexible, responsive, innovative training solutions on demand.
"Educational pathways for professional staff groups are well established, but this is not necessarily true for the majority of the support workforce, many of whom contribute directly to patient care, explains Helen. "If we are to deliver a radical improvement in skills within this area of the workforce, new training programmes must be developed that carry credit in line with the Credit Qualifications Framework for Wales as an integral element,"
This impetus to provide evidence of staff competence has been reinforced by the recent introduction of the Knowledge & Skills Framework (KSF) across the NHS, which links education, competence and development of staff to employment costs, improved patient care and greater efficiency and productivity. In essence it aims to provide an audit process to support 'stringent clinical and corporate governance requirements and an opportunity for learners to have a unified record of all their learning and qualifications.
Helen's two year relationship with The Training Foundation and support from Workforce Development at the National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Healthcare (NLIAH)has been invaluable in helping her to tackle all of these challenges.
"A few years ago we lacked robust methodologies and templates for quality assuring our programme design and delivery, setting objectives and testing how effectively those objectivees had been met and, most importantly,
assessing outcomes" she explains.
The TAP® Learning System seemed to tick all the boxes and the fact that it is widely used by the NHS in England provided the evidence base Helen was looking for. She enrolled herself onto a course leading to the award of the TAP Certificate in Training Delivery Skills, shortly before registering the corporate training and health and safety teams onto the same course.
Her colleague, Project Manager Claire Williams, attended the Training Delivery Skills course in January 2007:
"It was fantastic. I was new to training and, as a very process oriented person, I really appreciated the fact that the TAP Leaming System gave all of us very definite processes to follow. It's very frustrating to try and pick up things from a predecessor or another colleague if there's no common structure to the programmes,but the TAP templates and framework completely eliminate that problem because everyone adopts the same methodology. It makes life so much simpler and the questioning techniques were a real confidence booster in helping me to make my sessions more interactive and beneficial for the learner."
Helen also endorses the impact TAP® has had in terms of improving quality of delivery, offering a more robust framework, reducing costs and measuring outcomes.
"People think a lot more carefully about objectives and effective teaming strategies and techniques to measure and achieve those objectives. In terms of measuring outcomes cost reductions and delegate evaluations have certainly been very favourable, but the real litmus test is the fact that we can now attach credit to our courses."
An immediate priority following the integration was to ensure that our integrated partners were 'TAP dipped' so that the entire training team was unified, shared a common vision and operated to the same systems, processes, standards and assessments. Achieving the TAP Certificate in Training Delivery Skills has given even the most experienced trainers a renewed enthusiasm for delivering the highest quality training provision.
Marie Williams, Deputy Head of Learning &. Development within the new Trust and with 15 years of teaching experience enthused: "the teaching methodologies delivered on the programme notonly encouraged you to build upon your existing skills but offered new and innovative ways of designing and delivering training which ticks all the boxes for both the learner and the trainer. It just goes to show that you can teach old dogs new tricks"
With every member of the team now TAP qualified, the Cwm Taf NHS Trust has been awarded TAP Gold Partner status.
"Our TAP Gold Partner status enables us to demonstrate to the organisation that we are a professional team who design and deliver to consistently high standards within a robust standardised framework."
About the Training Foundation
The Training Foundation was formed in 1998. It is the only performance improvement organisation to receive a Queen's Award for Innovation. It is focused on assisting employers to improve organisational performance in two critical areas; by sustaining high employee engagement and by effective learning and development strategies.
www.trainingfoundation.com
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