Developing learning materials — Krystyna Mailer

End to end instructional design for a career pathway program.

After the height of the pandemic Healthscope hospitals required more nursing staff in specialty areas. Some hospitals were running separate programs, but there wasn’t a uniform approach that provided a consistent experience. So it was decided that the head office team would create a cohort based program to run alongside sites called Career Pathways.

As part of the team, I worked on:

Designing content into an interactive online course
Clinical competency assessment guides with help from site SMEs
Analytics collection including pre and post interviews and surveys
Designing additional collateral including pins and certificates

The process was a team effort existing of a TA partner (who recruited the candidates and reached out to sites to run the program), a Clinical Learning Partner (who had a nursing background and gave insight into how the program could work practically at sites) and myself.

So how could we create a supportive program to attract and retain experienced nurses to sites?

Process

There were several constraints to factor into the solution:

These nurses would already have 1 to 2 years of nursing experience.
- The course wouldn’t start from a total beginner level.
It needed to provide enough of a foundation so that the participants could work independently by the end of it.
- Our content and training on site needed to give the right amount of support to achieve this.
Most hospitals were still paper based and did not have the technology to support a fully digital solution.
- So things like digital forms on ipads couldn’t be used.
Sites are generally time poor.
- Since we were relying on sites to deliver the majority of the program, we needed something that was easy to implement and that provided them with support.
All hospitals were different sizes with different specialties.
- Our broader company strategy was to create a ‘one Healthscope’ vision. So it needed to be something consistent and uniform that could also have flexibility for sites and different specialties. Learners from different sites also needed to feel like they were part of the ‘one Healthscope’ team.
Time allocation to additional learning was different for depending on the role e.g. a perioperative nursing shift (commonly full time) might consist of one surgery and then some downtime - allowing learners to complete online training during their shift. A ward nursing shift (commonly part time) was filled with tasks with minimal to no downtime - meaning sites needed to allocate time or learners had to use their personal time to complete online training.
- We needed to factor this into each specialty program. Due to the amount of upskill and detail the perioperative programs were set at 12 weeks and the acute care programs at 8 weeks. The content was then broken down into a per week delivery format.
The online course component needed the ability to be completed on site or at home.
- I designed the course in Rise so it was responsive.
No budget for additional tools/software.
- While I looked into alternative options - there wasn’t anything free that would be useful.
LMS was limited with analytics and not the best user experience.
- I had to use what we had and ensure we were still providing learners with a great experience.

Solution

Self Paced Online Course

The Learning Partner and myself wrote content, quizzes and created learning activities. We consulted with SMEs from several sites to provide input, feedback and QA.
Clinical Competency Assessments

To ensure participants could demonstrate tangible skills required for each role, we designed a set of competencies that preceptors could use to assess
Preceptor Guide & Portal

To take learners through the program, sites allocated an experienced nurse ‘preceptor’ to work with new learners. We developed a guide and portal on the LMS to help them facilitate the 12 weeks..
Group Calls

As a cohort based program the team ran a virtual introduction and a graduation ceremony. We also had a number of study days of different topics that were also run virtually that I recorded and posted to the LMS.
Pre, Mid and Post Cohort Survey

I designed 3 surveys to gauge learner feedback throughout the cohort. This was useful to apply to the next program I designed.
Team Retrospective Session

After the first two cohorts finished, I designed a microsoft whiteboard and ran a session with our team to go over our key learnings of the project and our processes.