Training at work

neviditelny · 30 Nov 2018 at 22:05

I thought I'll ask here for some opinions or maybe advice.

I work in a NHS hospital and earlier this week we went live with a new computer system that is being used with transferring patients between wards and ordering equipment etc. However, when going live with the system, pretty much no one on my ward had had any training of this system, nor had we been able to see how the system looks like. To get training while on shift is near impossible due to the pace of the ward and staffing issues. I'm now on my third day of having to use the program and still not had any training even though I've repeatedly asked for some training.
We did get an email sent out the other day which basically said "the things you might need to know is in this link"....
Am I just stupid to believe that they should have put more effort into training the staff in the use of the program prior to going live? Considering they have been telling us since the late summer that it is going to go live during the autumn/early winter.

And we also have mandatory training that the Trust have to give us once a year to twice a year (depending on which training it is) but they deem it my responsibility to make sure I have the training, even though it is a legal requirement for me to have the training. Surely it should be up to them to make sure I'm up to date with my training?

Trappi$t · 30 Nov 2018 at 22:22

Are you front line medical staff? As in my experience, the NHS is the least likely organisation to actually offer any training to staff, unless you are front line medical/dental etc.

Anything in the back offices, even at the higher levels, training courses and skills improvement is almost non-existent.

Boycey0211 · 30 Nov 2018 at 22:40

I'm pretty sure in all civil service jobs now they're trying to push it to purely online help and support in the form of faq's, it's hard work but someone in IT might be able to help you.

Personally I got volunteered as an administrator, I've got zero experience of any kind of IT support and was given 2 hours training which was an information overload. Luckily it's not my full time job and can get my questions answered within a day or two via email

SexyGreyFox · 30 Nov 2018 at 22:53

Trappi$t said:
Are you front line medical staff? As in my experience, the NHS is the least likely organisation to actually offer any training to staff, unless you are front line medical/dental etc.

Anything in the back offices, even at the higher levels, training courses and skills improvement is almost non-existent.

Not at my hospital, I've had to have training in every piece of NHS software I use and I must have at least 25 of them.
Most of the training is online and you can't get access unless you complete it.

Minstadave · 30 Nov 2018 at 23:04

We’ve just bought in new software for ED and it’s been a total mess, clearly rushed, designed by people who have no clinical knowledge, massive increase in mindless data entry with a terrible user interface.

We had a 1hr training session which was done by non clinical staff and didn’t address any of our needs.

neviditelny · 30 Nov 2018 at 23:33

Trappi$t said:
Are you front line medical staff? As in my experience, the NHS is the least likely organisation to actually offer any training to staff, unless you are front line medical/dental etc.

Anything in the back offices, even at the higher levels, training courses and skills improvement is almost non-existent.

I'm in one of the acute wards, so pretty much the next step down from A&E. Most of the programs we used when I started have gone out of use and those programs we had class room trainings for. Of the programs we need to use on a daily basis I have training for one of them, one of the most important programs is restricted to Nurses only (I'm a HCA). The new program is going to be used by everyone but to my knowledge no one on my unit had any training prior to the program going live and we are then expected to do everything according to the management.

neviditelny · 30 Nov 2018 at 23:36

Minstadave said:
We’ve just bought in new software for ED and it’s been a total mess, clearly rushed, designed by people who have no clinical knowledge, massive increase in mindless data entry with a terrible user interface.

We had a 1hr training session which was done by non clinical staff and didn’t address any of our needs.

I'm not surprised by that. We had our program for admitting/discharging patient replaced the other year. The new program is a lot more messy lay out wise, takes longer time to load and actually do tasks, and it is a lot more difficult in finding patients on it as well.
Quite often I find that a lot of things we use are very strangely designed considering the use of it. When we had the new admitting program going live we had people coming onto the wards to train our staff. Those trainers had had their own training in the program the week before training our hospital staff to use the program..

Skynet5 · 30 Nov 2018 at 23:41

I work in IT and have led the design of massive (1000s of users, millions of users) systems. As a senior architect I am typically involved in contributing to the service transition phase.

Execution is typically very poor in this area imo when scaling to a large user base.

I'm always dissappointed and highlight that in my post mortem sessions. I think it is mostly related to the train the trainer stages. They are resistant to change and want failure...so help make failure more likely.

Typically training (and validation of solution) should be done during build. Prototypes should be available to use way before to validate the design ala Google design sprints etc .

So yeah, it's typical.

Trappi$t · 1 Dec 2018 at 00:49

SexyGreyFox said:
Not at my hospital, I've had to have training in every piece of NHS software I use and I must have at least 25 of them.
Most of the training is online and you can't get access unless you complete it.

Ahh good to know its not a universal issue then, and just varying between boards! There is hope.

Rroff · 1 Dec 2018 at 01:00

Seems to be the way in most industries - fortunately I'm pretty quick at learning digital systems and interfaces for myself but some of my colleagues really struggle. In most cases there is no proper feedback and/or it is just ignored so relatively small but significant issues persist with many systems poorly implemented.

Last two places I worked rolled out fancy new web/portal based systems with all the bells and whistles (and only really functioned on the latest version of Chrome) while outside of head office most PCs were slim terminal type or really ancient (only having like 128MB RAM) running IE7 which took more than 5 minutes just to login to the site and would crash on the heavier pages - I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

SexyGreyFox · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:11

Trappi$t said:
Ahh good to know its not a universal issue then, and just varying between boards! There is hope.

Don't get me wrong, some of it is useless like Minstadave has said above and it's as though nobody has asked the professionals for their input.
I use a new Maternity one called K2, it's a nightmare, tab after tab with sub field after subfield and if you want to print something out from one of a 1000 pages you have to put your password in every time.
We got taken to court over none disclosure of records and we had statement of truths off all involved but it went higher.
Yesterday I got a call from a midwife saying: if you click on that, then on that, click that sub heading, and that sub heading, click on that tab, then that sub heading, click on that then you can see what you're after

Minstadave · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:22

SexyGreyFox said:
Don't get me wrong, some of it is useless like Minstadave has said above and it's as though nobody has asked the professionals for their input.
I use a new Maternity one called K2, it's a nightmare, tab after tab with sub field after subfield and if you want to print something out from one of a 1000 pages you have to put your password in every time.
We got taken to court over none disclosure of records and we had statement of truths off all involved but it went higher.
Yesterday I got a call from a midwife saying: if you click on that, then on that, click that sub heading, and that sub heading, click on that tab, then that sub heading, click on that then you can see what you're after

Oh man don't get me started on K2. It is MUCH better than Symphony however.

SexyGreyFox · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:27

Minstadave said:
Oh man don't get me started on K2. It is MUCH better than Symphony however.

At least you know I'm not exaggerating

Bengaboy · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:31

Unfortunately, if it is anything like the Military, you have to use the online self help tools and videos. Most of which are on YouTube. YouTube is banned on defence networks...

I was voluntold to be the subject matter expert along with my boss. It is extremely lucky we are tech minded, someone lesser so would've struggled massively.

Jamauk · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:35

Similar situation in the company I work for whereby with a new system from the company we work for was deployed after I alone had a 20 minute webinar. There was no trial of the system before it went live, simply moving from the old system to the new one morning.

Since going live I have identified a few issues that I have had to feed back to the company we work for, these were oversights in the testing phase at their end and only came to light because of the number of different accounts I have under my user ID. My employer completely supported me when I point blank refused to train my team until I have used the system for a few weeks and that all the issues with it are resolved, last week I was on the phone to them, several times each day as they tried to figure out why their system wasn't working! Once the reason for the fault had been identified yesterday it then took the authorisation from five people before work could be done on fixing it - this was a simple fix that took a couple of minutes.

Considering this is a global company that is developing and deploying the software to thousands of other companies across the globe, you would have thought the testing phase would have been a bit more thorough.

Rroff · 1 Dec 2018 at 13:50

Jamauk said:
this was a simple fix that took a couple of minutes.

I know stuff has to go through extensive qualification testing (hahaha) before being rolled out to a live production system - but it is something I've found incredibly frustrating over the years - simple fixes that I could literally do in 5 minutes that take like 2 months and a lot of jumping through hoops before they appear in the system and one place I was working I created (programmed) a fully functional proof of concept of how they could move data from one system to another automatically - while it was part of a bigger digital make over something like £1.6million and many months later (can't remember after all this time how long) the new system was rolled out to much fanfare and was buggier and less functional than the version that I'd created literally in an afternoon.

EDIT: Funny enough I found all the code for it (printed on A4) in one of my personal document folders the other day when having a tidy out - can't remember why I printed it all out now but I was kind of proud of it at the time.

shadow_boxer · 1 Dec 2018 at 16:12

SexyGreyFox said:
Not at my hospital, I've had to have training in every piece of NHS software I use and I must have at least 25 of them.
Most of the training is online and you can't get access unless you complete it.

In more recent years I've found this to be case. IT won't issue usernames or set up accounts until they've got proof of completion of training. Previously however I agree that it was a right pain to get any time to get to training with the demands on the wards. My advice would be to insist in the strongest possible terms that you get given time (paid time) to attend even if it means escalation. At the end of the day if there is an error or potential near miss you won't have a leg to stand on by saying you didn't have an opportunity to do it.

As for annual mandatory training I see this as your responsibility to keep on top of. No difference to completing tax returns, car insurance etc. They may well send you reminders but ultimately the responsibility is yours. It protects you and the trust.

SexyGreyFox · 1 Dec 2018 at 18:49

shadow_boxer said:
As for annual mandatory training I see this as your responsibility to keep on top of. No difference to completing tax returns, car insurance etc. They may well send you reminders but ultimately the responsibility is yours. It protects you and the trust.

At the RSUH you can have the Stat & Mand questions up while you're reading the answers on the downloadable PDF