Reducing Health Care Training Administration Costs in difficult times

PB Business Solutions has developed a low cost, net based application that reduces the training administration costs of staff in the Health Care sector .

The western world is faced with an ageing populace with the number of citizens wanting care services reckoned to grow exponentially over the next number of years and decades .  This will put extraordinary stress on the meagre financial resources available in the post credit crunch deficit reducing environment in which we find ourselves.

Every  endeavour is being made by Health Care management businesses and individual care homes to get best value for money by concentrating greater allocations of resources at “the coal face” of front line care. 

Clearly this is going to need a significant number of appropriately educated , motivated and dedicated  workers .  And therein lies a problem : the care sector is not perceived as a “sexy”, well paid career path type of job .  The lower echelons of personnel are paid around national minimum wage rates and are very likely to move on to other positions away from the industry thus wasting any education given.

Training is essential in any business but in Health Care it is, for a range of qualifications, legally mandatory .  It therefore makes good economic sense to retain as many staff as possible.  Why go to the time and cost of educating only for staff to depart leaving a legacy of re-employment and re-training cost ?  Surely it is much better to demonstrate a commitment to existing staff and offer , to those who want it, the real opportunity for career enhancement into the higher paid supervisory and management posts .

The whole area of training administration in the health sector is complex, time consuming and expensive.  The range of certifications required for the differing personnel groups is further complicated by the fact that any given member of staff can perform a number of those roles, This involves even greater complication because certain qualifications have expiry periods of, typically, two or three years requiring refresher, or even re-qualification courses to be taken.

It is by no means uncommon to find examples of staff members who have qualified twice or even three times when others have not been trained at all.  Staff are prone to “forget” to attend training courses which leaves the Health Care organisation still having to pay the trainers’ fees for partially attended courses but also having to re-book training for absentees, needing further time and expense .  And then, as if to add insult to injury, all of this requires administrative personnel who are a pure overhead cost to the organisation .

The WCS Care Group took their first steps in December 2009 to implement the training administration system to not only organise the whole training requirement from an administrative viewpoint but also to include a Business Intelligence tool to provide interactive, graphically based dashboards giving senior management powerful tools to create, monitor and manage their training policies. 

 This is what Ed Russell, Director of Operations at WCS had to say:

 “I just had to let you know how delighted we are with the training administration system. 

 Attendance at training courses has shot up by over 126%!

We have set workforce Development targets for each role within the organisation and have available reports and can monitor progress at the touch of a button.

 Homes Managers have reduced the amount of paperwork and time spent monitoring training and enjoy seeing their results displayed on a variety of graphs.

 All in all a very useful and cost saving solution for managing our training administration.”

PB Business Solutions provide this multi user, internet based training administration management system on a software as a service basis at prices ranging from £25 per month for a single site operation up to a maximum of £100 per month with unlimited number of sites.

There are no limits on the numbers of offices / homes / depots etc and no restrictions on the number of users each organisation can create.  It requires no special equipment or infrastructure, just a PC with a connection to the internet.