Web program cures hospital's training ills

Nearly every company has some sort of annual training safety procedures, for instance and employees seldom greet the training sessions with anything but grumbling.

Washoe Medical Center, which like most hospitals faces a long list of annual training sessions, reduced the grumbling and increased employee involvement through an innovative Web-based training system.

Rather than troop into an auditorium for a half-day training session, employees of the medical center schedule their own sessions in front of a computer.

And they can't doze off.

The training programs require them to stay interactive.

The homegrown program was developed by Deborah Cline, a registered nurse at Washoe Medical Center.

Although she didn't have any formal computer programming experience, Cline was comfortable with computers and willing to begin exploring their use for a hospital training program launched in 2001.

She attended a Macromedia training, then devoted about six months to thinking through how computer-based courses might work.

When Cline began, she set down the ground rules for the on-line training:

* It had to be Intranet based so that employees could take the courses at convenient times and places.

In fact, some of the hospital's interest in computer- based learning arose because night-shift nurses hated coming to daytime training seminars.

* It needed to be truly interactive, even if the interactivity was simple.

Nothing is deadlier, Cline says, that a computer training course that's little more than a textbook page displayed on a screen.

One upshot of that: Each screen in her learning programs is limited to two paragraphs of text.

After two paragraphs, the user must do something, even if it's nothing more than move to the next page.

Users answer questions approximately every three screens.

And the courses are entertaining.

One is developed around a Sherlock Holmes theme.

A training session on patient acuity carries a carnival theme.

The entertainment value of the courses has proven important to their success, says Ron Laxton, vice president and chief nursing officers of Washoe Medical Center.

"Not only does it allow us to remain clinically competent, it's also fun," he said.

Because the programs are easy to use, he says they're not daunting to older staff members who may not be computer savvy.

The hospital created a learning center with four computers where a steady stream of employees arrived through the day to complete the courses.

Employees who aren't able to leave their stations night-shift nurses, for instance can tap into the Intranet from their desks.

That's a convenience for hospital administrators as well, says Laxton, because nurses and other employees aren't taken away from patient care for mandatory training sessions.

A survey of the hospital's nursing staff found 80 percent think the on-line courses are at least as good if not better than classroom sessions.

As Cline, the self-taught developer of educational programs, has worked her way through five classes for Washoe Medical Center, she's learned some lessons about ways to make the courses more effective.

She learned, for instance, to keep her screens clear of anything that looks like a browser.

Users have a choice of three screen commands: Forward, backward and select.

Cline also worked hard to keep the programs simple.

No streaming video hogging bandwidth.

Instead, she relies on simple Flash graphics.

And as a manager of a software program who relies on others, she learned not to promise delivery dates.

Instead, she tells her bosses that work will be done a certain amount of time after she's received everything she needs for others in the organization.

Among the next projects she'll undertake is an on-line orientation for new employees of the hospital.