Totara Learn drives up compliance rates in Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust… and the users love it!

This Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust LMS case study highlights how Totara improved compliance rates and streamlined training for the Trust.

Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust provides Community Care across the county’s homes, schools, clinics and community hospitals. Around 2800 staff successfully provide 1.7 million patient visits and appointments annually, and notably, 97% of its patients would happily recommend the Trust’s services to their friends and family.

Key challenges

To begin with, the Trust approached Think Learning to design and implement a Learning Management System to deliver over 250 in-house courses, manage the induction of up to 50 new starters every month, and provide access to a further 250 e-learning courses, mostly provided by e-Learning for Healthcare.

The organisation previously relied on a legacy LMS. They combined data from this system with HR/ESR data inside a separate business intelligence tool to report on compliance. As a result, this process was time-consuming, labour-intensive, and required many hours of staff time each month—even though it still represented an improvement over the centrally procured NHS Oracle LMS.

Another major challenge was ensuring the LMS could provide mobile access for the 2,000 staff members who use mobile devices to update the clinical system. Consequently, this represented a significant opportunity to engage learners away from Trust sites, which is critical for community-based staff.

However, the legacy LMS was unable to meet this requirement.

How Totara solved it

Think Learning had implemented Totara Learn at over 25 NHS Trusts, allowing them to migrate data and set up reports quickly. In addition, the Trust needed a seamless switchover, with compliance reporting available the same month the old LMS was retired. Totara delivered this from go-live, providing divisional reports and user dashboards that immediately reduced manual reporting work.

NHS Streamlining requirements were met within days, with Core Skills Training Framework data uploaded into ESR and updated weekly. Since then, the L&D team has refined both ESR and Totara reporting to improve accuracy and speed.

With full admin access, the team created a service administrator dashboard. This allowed managers to track compliance more easily and book training for their teams.

Staff engagement and feedback

To gather user feedback, an online questionnaire was made available from the LMS homepage. Within a short period, the Trust received 119 responses.

During the survey, respondents shared their satisfaction with the new system and provided narrative feedback. Overall, every indicator showed positive improvement. Specifically, the “Overall Time Taken” rating highlighted how much quicker and easier staff found the new LMS.

Survey measures and average scores

Staff frequently commented on how simple the system was to use. When feedback indicated that a learner needed additional support, user guides were updated and shared immediately.

“I just clicked on the icon with the owl symbol… everything was there. I loved that the link took me straight to the right course. I didn’t have to risk choosing the wrong one. Love it so far — thank you and well done.” – A Trust user

Results and Impact

Since implementing Totara Learn, the Trust has achieved significant business and user benefits.

In just 3 months, the trust:

• Achieved and maintained 94.4% compliance across a complex set of statutory and mandatory training requirements.
• Reduced first-line support queries by 80%.
• Saw surveyed users report that e-learning, booking, and compliance management are all easier and quicker than in the legacy LMS.
• Cut classroom non-attendance from 10% to 4.7%.
• Saved up to 3 days each week in staff time through the new LMS.
• Increased training rates by 80%, with 1,500 employees successfully completing training.

‘Most staff tell us they find the system easier or much easier to use. We can see this in the huge fall in queries, saving us up to 3 days per week in staff time. Compliance is now at its highest ever’ – Jane Trundle, Head of L&D

‘I can be confident now in how much time to allocate to staff to complete their training because they can see exactly what they need to do.’ – Trust Manager

‘It is just SO MUCH BETTER than the old system which was verging on impossible particularly when only used infrequently!’  – A Trust user