DECHA is an alliance of independent and voluntary sector employers within the Social Care and Health sector, providing services to the people of County Durham. Their vision is ‘to support the delivery of high quality health and social care within County Durham by supporting employers in developing a workforce fit for its purpose.’

They offer a number of short courses and e-learning courses to meet this vision. The current e-learning licence started July 2008 since this date usage has grown from strength to strength. They have produced 982 completion certificates in year one and 1231 in year two.

Why use e-learning?

County Durham is a large rural county covering 942 square miles of the UK. With a wide spread county and many rural and remote locations organising classroom training courses can be difficult. Combine that with the majority of the alliance organisations offering shift work to employees, this makes classroom training even more difficult.

E-learning fits the needs of their members allowing bite sized learning which is flexible, user friendly and a record of learning can be produced.

How have they generated interest?

So what do they do to gain such excellent results? Jackie Eager Assistant Development Officer puts the success of the e-learning courses down to constant marketing.  ‘We have over 300 care establishments throughout the county which are members.

Hi, my name is Claire Treadwell and I work as a Customer Support Manager based in the North East of England. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share news about some of the workshops the Learning Nexus team will be delivering from September.

Although there are four types of workshops, they all provide our customers with the opportunity to share best practice ideas about  e-learning service delivery. We have a lot of innovative customers and when they get together in the same room the ideas keep on coming!  For example, I was involved in a recent best practice event at St James Park for the Health Care and Education sectors. We had great positive feedback from everyone who attended on how such events can help them improve their e-learning offerings and I am sure that the workshops will gain similar feedback. With the collective enthusiasm of all our customers, I can’t see why this wouldn’t be the case.