New on iris: Competencies

The UHSussex TEL Team are pleased to announce new features on iris to support the rating and recording of Competencies.

This new system was launched earlier in the year as a limited pilot with framework of five clinical competencies.

We are now opening up the system to more educators and departments who wish to rate, record and track their staff’s competencies, both clinical and non-clinical.

What are the benefits of a Competency system?

Competencies are skills and capabilities staff have to perform aspects of their job. In a lot of cases, particularly in clinical areas, competencies are required by policies on a national and/or internal scale.

Currently, a lot of our Trust’s competency records are kept (potentially unstructured) in paper or digital formats. This makes it administratively challenging to retrieve and report on their data. It also makes adding this information into systems such as HealthRoster more inefficient.

With a universal digital competency on iris, we can accomplish the following:

Implement and reinforce Trust-wide applicable competency frameworks
Use a familiar platform to rate competencies with a variety of methodologies
Extract and report on competency data from one source
Provide educators and managers with the means to upskill their staff
Maintain a reliable source of competency data that can be utilised by other Trust systems

How do Competencies differ from Courses and Certifications on iris?

As competencies are a new feature of iris, the team has had to create a baseline approach to thinking about them and what they represent. It is quite possible that our perspectives and approach may change in the future.

At the moment, we are seeing Competencies as an alternative option to Certifications.

Certifications are points of compliance staff need to meet and are utilised to facilitate the repeating aspect of Courses. In that regard, Courses complete Certifications which then in turn will clear progress to enable staff to update them after a defined period of time.

Competencies differ in one key area. They do not require Courses in order to complete them.

A Competency can be completed in one or a combination of the following ways:

Manual self-rating
Manual rating by another person (ie. manager, PD Educator)
Course completion
Performance activity completion (Note: this is not a fully tested feature and not currently available for use)

Many competencies require observation and confirmation of practical applications of skills by someone who is already competent. In the past, we utilised an iris feature called OJT as an activity within courses to facilitate these assessment paradigms.

With the new Competency system, we are able to expand the options available on iris to deploy more learning and assessment methods while still ensuring we can store, track and report on accurate training data.

What does this mean for the old OJT system?

The OJT activity found in some iris courses was a workaround our team implemented to facilitate manual rating of competencies and assessments. This activity, while still functioning, has not been updated by its developers in a long time and it is predicted to cease functioning in the coming few years.

The tool itself was also more impractical to use when the scale of learners increased. It became slow and cumbersome for assessors to utilise when assessing multiple learners.

With that in mind, we will be slowly phasing out the OJT activities from existing course pages. As of recently, we are also halting its use in new projects.

What competency frameworks are currently available on iris?

As of writing, we still only have the Core Clinical Competencies on iris. We are also working with educators towards moving their existing OJT activities into the new system and encouraging new developments to take advantage of it where appropriate.