Why Invest in Healthcare Training for Staff

Training that produces a return on investment

Too often staff training days are a ‘tic the box’ exercise. Whilst it is important to ensure all staff have undergone compulsory training such as manual handling, employers should be demanding more value from these exercises and employees should feel the benefit of training the moment they begin the exercise. Servisource training has made it their niche to transform these short continuous professional development programs into consistent, high quality and engaging events that most importantly produce the benefits that employers and employees alike, desire. Manual handling training must produce observable reductions in reported back pain amongst employees, likewise infection prevention and control training must produce observable changes to staff practices with the very desirable effect of decreasing healthcare associated cross infection of patients.

Several key aspects should be considered by employers reviewing their training approach in this regard:

Plan – Schedule your training well in advance, setting out an annual plan the preceding year is most effective. If you have a staff compliment of 30, any single training requirement of these staff is going to cast the equivalent of an average single employee monthly wage. Any inefficiencies in your training is going to be costly and unnecessary.

Standardise – Use a training method that is verifiable by external sources such as FETAC, The Irish Heart Foundation, An Bord Altranis etc. This will help to ensure that the message received by your staff is consistent and that compliance with regulating bodies is easily demonstrated.

Tailor – Without tailoring, generic programs come across as rigid and inapplicable to the staff on the course. The training organisation and the client should discuss each element of the course ensuring that it is empathic to the staff work practice context.

Feedback & review – A key component of any training program but often overlooked as ‘happy sheets’ and dismissed. A short appraisal gives the participant an opportunity to review their key learning outcomes aiding their retention. It also presents the training organisation with the info required to develop their training in the direction demanded by the participants.

Observe & examine – Training programs need to become more verifiable in terms of their effect on work practices – this is the litmus test of any training program. Time should be taken to accumulate reported information in order to examine the actual return provided by the training.

There is every incentive to achieve these objectives and this is the motivation underpinning our service. The frontline staffs in the health service are the most important staff, they do the work. To that effect we must ensure their development is efficient and very effective and this will produce safer better healthcare. Servisource training makes it their business to help organisations achieve these goals. It is an organisation that is developing and growing, providing jobs and assisting the economy, all whilst assisting the health service in preventing injury and providing a quality standard of care.