Devon County Council

Background

As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the UK’s decision to go into national lockdown in March 2020, Devon County Council (DCC) was tasked with providing asymptomatic testing sites across the county to enable services to remain open and to reduce the spread of the virus.

Challenge

The Council needed to set up testing provisions across Devon quickly while recruiting and training large numbers of staff to work at these centers. It was essential to follow Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) clinical training standards and ensure DCC induction processes were embedded for a quality and easily accessible service for the Citizens of Devon.

Solution

Initially, it was unclear to DCC how best to provide the service; how many people would be needed to maintain the three initial static sites, and how feasible were plans to have mobile test vans serving the rural areas. Pulling together an emergency project team, the organization scoped out a requirement for an online training platform that would:

• Induct staff members to the organization, ensuring corporate responsibility is paramount
• Introduce staff to Lateral Flow Testing (LFT), its importance and purpose
• Educate staff on the importance of community testing sites
• Enable staff to complete the Department of Health and Social Care’s training on the government learning platform -Tessello- and track completion rates. Site operatives and team leaders had two separate learning paths that needed to be captured

The Council implemented Learning Pool Platform with user-friendly dashboards designed to be aligned with DCC principles as well as the objectives of community testing, so staff could complete training virtually.

The content, including lessons from Learning Pool Library Content, created programs that were housed on the platform and were designed to be self-led by learners with admin support on the side, to ensure completion of mandatory training.

DCC was able to take advantage of the messaging notification functionality within Learning Pool Platform, creating a welcome message that thanked staff for supporting the testing centers across DCC and asked learners to complete the learning by following the digitally linked clear instructions. While a basic function, this helped the Council to save both time and money, by not having to contact all new staff individually.

Response

“The Learning Pool support desk was engaged during the project and helped us to work out new ways to make the training process easy to follow. This project has led to far more than any of the team could ever imagine, supporting communities not just with LFT, but also helping the hard-to-reach communities checking in on priority cohorts. This includes people that live in areas of social deprivation and high population density, people who work in high exposure risk areas, multigenerational high occupancy households and people at higher risk of catching COVID-19.”

Jo Prince-White, Senior HR Strategy and Performance Advisor

Results

DCC’s organizational goal was to ensure the people of Devon remained safe and had equal access to testing opportunities. Learning Pool Platform became an integral part of the Council’s objectives to ramp up testing in the Devon County area. The Lateral Flow Testing dashboard was launched in January 2021 just in time for the first recruits to prepare themselves for the first test center at County Hall Exeter.

The implementation of Learning Pool Platform enabled learners to complete training at a convenient time for them, meaning they were able to start in their new roles as quickly as possible. The LFT training has been a pivotal part of the successful community testing program with over 100 staff members completing the training.

A by-product of this project has also been the opportunity to offer easy LFT to all DCC staff to ensure the normal day-to-day work is continued to keep the people of Devon safe. The platform has also meant that the Council has been able to deliver on Government instruction by putting into practice a training programme to support the successful launch of LFT community testing across Devon.