COVID-19 awareness
COVID-19 AWARENESS
Award-winning COVID-19 rapid response course
In March 2020, in the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Skills for Health, the UK sector skills council for health, decided to help healthcare workers nationwide work safely by delivering a free course on COVID-19 awareness.
The free version of the course is available on the Skills for Health website. All rights to the course belong to Skills for Health.
Target group
This free course was developed for UK healthcare staff, but professionals from other sectors also benefitted from the course.
Objective
The goal was to simplify the COVID-19 guidance as much as possible, to help healthcare workers who were under unprecedented pressure.
Tools
The storyboard was developed in MS Powerpoint and the interactive course was developed in Gomo.
CHALLENGES
Number of resources
At the time of project initiation, there were approximately 170 government and NHS guidance resources from 17 different areas.
Overlapping information
In some cases, the information was overlapping and there was duplication.
Tight timeline and no SME
The time to deliver was tight and access to medical SMEs was difficult due to the circumstances.
ROLE
As an Instructional Designer at Skills for Health back in 2020, I undertook the task of collating the government resources per topic and then per role in a storyboard and determining whether there were duplications on the content. This helped speed up the process. Then, the interactive content was developed on the authoring tool. The nature of the authoring tool allowed for content build-up depending on the role.
The course was released to the public on the 26th of March 2020, a few days after the UK national lockdown, thanks to an efficient collaboration between the company's digital and marketing departments.
RESULT
Since the course launched, over 33,000 professionals in the healthcare and public sector have taken the course. The training has been extremely well received, with over 95% of learners saying the course was very useful, informative, engaging, and vital to ensuring COVID-19 and warning signs were recognised and understood.
The course won a GCN silver award for best COVID-19 response involving the public sector, on the 25th of November 2021. The awards were judged independently by a panel of Chief Experience Officers from a wide range of market sectors.
The judges concluded that Skills for Health provided a "Fabulous and rapid response to a clear need from front-line NHS staff". They particularly commended Skills for Health for delivering "A difficult project that involved rapidly changing guidance at speed to thousands of skilled professionals longing to use their skills to help".