Developing digital and data skills across the health and care sector

THE CHALLENGE:
The health and care sector is on a mission to harness the best of digital technologies to improve the care and well-being of people in Scotland. NHS Education for Scotland (NES) – a Special Health Board designed to promote best practice and life-long learning for all health and care staff – challenged frog to design easy-access learning for its workforces, in a bid to transform digital literacy and competencies across the sector.

OUR RESPONSE:
We began an eight-week user-centred discovery, conducting interviews and research to understand how employees navigated current learning systems and uncover any overarching opportunity areas.

Employees shared daily struggles with basic but inaccessible digital tools. With the tough demands of the job, they had turned away from the technologies designed to make their lives easier. Many resorted to pen-and-paper note-taking or spending hours going through endless tutorials in the search for relevant, quality resources to help them understand these digital tools – creating disjointed learning experiences alongside existing pressures in the sector.
We identified a challenge to create a unified, personalised learning experience that upskilled staff whose lack of confidence may make them resistant to technology.

THE VISION:
Empathising with these employee pain points, we created a vision for a centralised learning and development library. Not just a resource centre but an accessibly-designed platform that addressed actual employee needs, complete with: inspiring learning and guided career paths; customised learning pathways on personalised dashboards; quick ways to access learning, from any device, removing barriers for the employees who told us they had technology access or time limitations.
We visualised the experience design with: future-state user journey maps; a clickable, interactive prototype; concept cards that dived deeper into features and explored future iterations of the design.

THE IMPACT:
The design sparked critical conversations among senior stakeholders about the need for a user-centric service that doesn’t just help hard-working staff keep up with their job requirements, it instils confidence in new digital skills, embodies a community of learning, and provides customised experiences based on individual needs.
They’re also invested in our human-led approach to progressing the sector – recognising the design as a beacon for joining up people, resources and processes, to provide a unified learning experience. It’s a vision for a service that makes people feel happy, confident, and invested in. A service that could have a noticeable impact on its ultimate end user – patients.
It’s a vision that illustrates how tech and design can be harnessed to motivate and boost morale, especially in a sector currently under intense public scrutiny.
It shows how they can help teams enjoy career progression for their hard work and create an environment that motivates staff to develop rather than seeing learning as an obligation.

It’s proof that we can create a meaningful, inclusive learning environment that shapes an impactful human experience for everyone.

THE CLIENT’S RESPONSE:
“This work demonstrates that NHS Education for Scotland is progressive in the digital landscape while continuing to listen to the voice of learners across Scotland’s health and care workforce.
“By developing meaningful connections with people, we can collaboratively develop digital competency and ensure our workforce are confident to be part of this journey.
“The work has triggered thoughtful conversations about how we leverage digital technology in education and learning and I am very excited about what’s to come next!”
Karen Reid, Chief Executive of NHS Education for Scotland