09-13

=**DOVE - Developing Ongoing Vocational Education**= toc

**RTO**
TAFENSW - North Coast Institute

**Contact**
Margaret Spears margaret.spears@tafensw.edu.au

**Category**
Empowering learners/RTO-Business Partnership

**Business Partner**
Catholic Healthcare

Executive summary
Catholic Healthcare Ltd (CHCS) operates 39 residential aged care communities and three community hospitals. They provide community services to approximately 3,500 people in their homes across New South Wales. This organisation has in the last two years almost doubled the number of services under their umbrella and consequently the number of employees. To ensure they have employees with current skills, CHCS needs to be able to continue to build on its e-learning strategies by finding a variety of different cost effective methods of delivering training.

The primary focus of this project is to provide a range of responsive best practice professional development opportunities that can be quickly developed and delivered in the workplace to a range of workers in the Aged Care Industry sector by utilising North Coast TAFE’s HEALNet program. This program will be a series of short, sharp professional development topics to be uploaded and used by the Aged Care industry. The secondary focus of this project is to provide Catholic Healthcare with the opportunity to become more engaged in e-learning catering to a regional and metropolitan audience.

The staff being targeted for this initiative are Catholic Healthcare’s Senior Clinicians and Managers. Most of the target group are Registered Nurses with a degree in Nursing or Certificate of Nursing. Some will be Enrolled Nurses. Catholic Healthcare staff are ageing which is a similar demographic as the Aged Care workforce. The average age of the target group would be approximately 52 years of age. The age range is 25-70 years. All of the senior clinicians and managers require basic computer skills to perform their roles in their service.

A Literature Review on barriers to e-learning by Aged and Community Services, the peak body for this Industry, states: Older workers want e-learning that stretches but does not stress them, …Employers who recognise e-learning as a shared investment by workers and management, who provide their staff with computer access and allocated e-learning time, and who actively champion e-learning in their workplace, are likely to reap the very substantial benefits of e-learning (ACS 2008)

The project will enable CHCS to participate in e-learning at an organisational level. Nurses are encouraged by the NSW Nurses and Midwives Board and many Nursing Associations to participate in relevant training that attracts Continuing Education Units. This project will not only allow them to have responsive training but will help them demonstrate their currency.

The tangible outcomes of this project will be:

Report of uptake and utilisation for CHCS with recommendations as to how to continue to increase uptake and embedding within organisation.
 * Application of the e-learning packages across all three CHCS Services, accessible to staff in rural/regional as well as metropolitan areas
 * Develop a Blog to be used as a Case study of project available to the flexible learning framework. This will include all tools used to survey participants, full briefing as the challenges, any issues and how we overcame them. Roles of project and other stakeholders will be identified. Photographs and screen dumps of the project will be available as will the evaluation comments of the users.
 * A Digital story will be developed to showcase the process and findings