A Four-Day Turnaround to Help Rapidly Deliver Essential COVID-19 Training

Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) is saving lives by developing guidelines, influencing policy, delivering courses and supporting cutting-edge research. Through education, training and research, RCUK is working towards the day when everyone in the UK has the skills they need to save a life.

RCUK has a long relationship with PeopleFluent’s parent company Learning Technologies Group (LTG) via sister company LEO Learning. LTG companies have worked on a large number of RCUK projects during the last decade, serving a network of 226,000 healthcare professionals with essential content that saves countless lives every year. The combined efforts of the group allow a flexible approach to any challenge clients face.

A Global Response to a Global Crisis

In the first quarter of 2020, with SARS-CoV-2 reaching Europe, resulting in the widespread transmission of the respiratory illness COVID-19 throughout the continent, governments were scrambling to engineer a rapid response to the pandemic. In the UK, two key elements of their plan (dubbed ‘Project Nightingale’) included the establishment of temporary respirator-equipped field hospitals in private exhibition spaces, and the return to work of a wave of former National Health Service (NHS) clinicians—initially around 20,000 individuals.

RCUK was approached by a key member of the team at the first of the field hospitals, NHS Nightingale at ExCeL London, with a request for resuscitation-specific digital course content. This content needed to be relevant to the NHS returners and the COVID-19 response.

RCUK subsequently requested eLearning authoring and hosting assistance from LEO Learning and the wider LTG group. Delivering the content involved several significant challenges, including:

• Immediate need: The first NHS Nightingale hospital was due to open within the following week and the training needed to be tested and deployed ahead of this date.
• Large volume of new users: The number of returning clinicians was expected to be high, with few, if any, enrolled onto the existing RCUK system.
• Learning technology skill gap: Similarly, there was no guarantee that returning clinicians would be up to speed on current learning platforms and practices.

A Solution Fuelled by a Modern Learning Experience Platform

PeopleFluent’s Learning Experience Platform (LXP)—Instilled—was at the center of the solution the group settled on and a six-month, 100,000+ user license for the LXP was provided to RCUK free of charge. The following key features made Instilled the most straightforward solution to the challenges faced:

• Flexibility: The tight schedule meant that the exact format of materials, and where they were hosted, weren’t solidly defined. Instilled’s wide compatibility with media types and external resources covered all eventualities.
• Self-service login: Neither RCUK nor their systems needed to be involved in the registration process—Instilled manages logins automatically and securely, in a highly scalable fashion.
• Ease of use: Instilled offers a straightforward and familiar user experience, similar to using popular consumer web experiences such as YouTube or Netflix. It can recommend content popular with users in a similar job role, and social features allow for discussion around resources.
• Easy deployment: Instilled is easy to roll out from a systems and personnel perspective. Its systems are intuitive to use and new users can be trained rapidly.

“We are incredibly grateful to all who assisted Resuscitation Council UK to set up the Instilled by PeopleFluent Learning Experience Platform (LXP) to host and deliver a custom course, ‘Adult resuscitation e-learning’, for the NHS in under 72 hours. This crucial piece of work will provide training for the vital healthcare professionals who are facing COVID-19 on the frontline and will benefit the patients who are under their care. In uncertain and trying times such as these, work like this will help make a difference.” – Dr James Cant, CEO of Resuscitation Council UK.

The five-module course—‘Adult resuscitation eLearning’—was built using the Gomo Learning authoring tool and adapted from existing RCUK Resuscitation course material. Tweaks were made as appropriate, to make the content relevant to returning professional clinicians and COVID-19 specifically. For example, a COVID-19-specific algorithm for life support application can be downloaded via the course for reference in the field.

Ready for the Frontline in Just Four Days

A joint effort from RCUK, PeopleFluent, LEO Learning and Gomo staff in an extremely short amount of time helped ensure delivery of the course content in under a week. From receiving RCUK’s brief to putting the course live, the team, based in the US and UK, was able to turn around the solution in a little over four days.

The course was then shared with NHS returners during the same week and, two weeks later, after being made mandatory for all clinicians at Nightingale hospitals, the training had been accessed by 1,300 users.

PeopleFluent, LEO Learning and Gomo Learning will continue to support RCUK and its content as the pandemic response evolves over the coming months.

“At a time of great urgency, we were impressed with LEO’s suggestion of using the Instilled Learning Experience Platform (LXP) alongside the tried-and-tested Gomo authoring tool. Though we had no previous hands-on time with an LXP, we were quickly trained in how to use it and were pleased with how easily learners can get access to everything they need.” - Sultana Begum Ali, e-Learning Product and Development Manager at Resuscitation Council UK.