Mid Yorkshire Hospitals transforms eLearning registrations with automation

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has undertaken a digital transformation using NDL’s robotic process automation (RPA) toolkit to speed up the process of virtual eLearning registrations.

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust is now able to process a full cohort of 200 Digital Learning System (DLS) registrations within 90 minutes – where previously the same volume would have taken a day and a half to process. With staff’s time and resources freed up, they have the capacity to deliver more training.

For the trust – which includes three hospitals providing acute services to over half a million residents across Wakefield and North Kirklees – it’s vital that staff have easy access to all essential training resources.

Gareth Cinnamon, digital programme manager, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Not only is it a big timesaver for the team, and an improvement for their mental health as they don’t have to sit and do all of this manually – but it also provides them with more time to provide extra courses and training to staff. It just frees up a lot of time, it’s actually quite amazing.”

Pre-digitalisation the registration process had to be done manually, with each taking around five minutes to complete and being open to potential human error. The trust launched a 12-month pilot of NDL’s RPA toolkit to automate its DLS registration process.

Initially applied to doctor DLS registrations, the registration requests were populated into a database, where a bot would then automatically create a unique account for each learner. As the pilot progressed improvements were made so that the bot was also able to enrol learners onto the relevant eLearning courses based on the learner’s job title. Once complete the learner receives an automatic email with account confirmation and log-in details.

As well as significantly speeding up the registration process, the new toolkit was also able to help detect errors so they could be flagged to the digital learning team for investigation and in the process reduce the rate of failed registrations. As the pilot evolved the solution was then deployed for all healthcare staff eLearning registrations.

Belinda Self, digital training team leader for Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “During a time that our organisation and the whole NHS is under great pressure, this has made a great difference to team morale. Their wellbeing has benefitted as the manual creation of eLearning accounts is very laborious.”

NDL has previously collaborated with Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council on a eForms project, and more recently the company provided the council with an electronic form so that local residents could book Covid-19 tests at the peak of the pandemic.