Contributory Factors to Disengagement with eLearning in the NHS Workforce

Brenda Little

Keywords:  eLearning; TEL; NHS; disengagement; education

The NHS is one of the UKs largest employers with a workforce of around 1.4 million in England and a further 160,000 in Scotland.  All employees are required to complete, as a minimum, statutory and mandatory training as laid down in the Core Skills Framework; in addition to this there is a large amount of learning required in order to maintain and update role related knowledge and skills.  With such a large workforce employed in over 350 different roles this amounts to a huge undertaking.

In 2007 NHS Connecting for Health published a paper (Candy, P.C. Elearning and NHS Connecting for Health: An Overview, 2007) outlining the importance of adopting eLearning as a major player in the delivery of education to NHS staff and how it fit into the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).  Almost 20 years later, although eLearning has been widely adopted within NHS Trusts, staff within North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust continue to appear dissatisfied with many aspects of its use whilst seemingly engaging with IT in other areas of their working life and indeed outside of work.

Data gathered over the past month by Administrative staff within the Learning and Organisational Development team show that over 85% of queries received relate to eLearning and mirror many of the reported issues in previous research, such as lack of IT skills, lack of time, poor IT equipment, difficulties interacting with the LMS etc.  This research project aims to identify and understand the reasons for disengagement with eLearning, especially in relation to the wider use of technology by staff both within their working lives and in the wider context, eg use of social media, shopping sites etc.

Although there is evidence of prior research around engagement with eLearning within the NHS, there are gaps within this.  Notably, research has tended to focus on the experience of clinical staff, in particular nursing and medical staff – in reality there are over 350 different roles within the NHS in both clinical and support roles.  This research will address this gap by seeking and analysing data from the full range of staff groups to ascertain whether, and to what extent, work role plays a part in engagement with eLearning.

The research will also look at how widely staff engage with other methods of learning; for example in the past 12 months there has been a 40% Did Not Attend (DNA) rate for face to face courses within NCIC despite staff anecdotally reporting a preference for classroom based teaching.

The research will take a mixed methods approach.  Quantitative data will be gathered via an anonymous online survey to ascertain demographic baseline data from respondents and also ways in which they are currently using both eLearning and wider aspects of IT.  To provide a more in depth review of users experiences and to understand any reluctance to the use of eLearning as a major educational tool, open questions will also be included in the survey and focus groups set up – there will be an element of structure to these questions to enable grouping and coding of responses which will then be used to further guide conversations.

It is hoped that by conducting this research, those aspects of wider IT use which engage the user can be aid further development in the design, deployment and engagement with Technology Enhanced Learning.  Ultimately, a major aim is that the results can help formulate a deeper understanding of the relationship between the whole workforce and ways of learning – could it be that the disengagement is as much to do with the ‘learning’ as the ‘e’?