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.

Every organisation that is visited for whatever reason is provided with a demo of the accessibility of the courses available or given a flyer or brochure which explains how they can give their employees access to the e-learning system.

During the first year of offering eLearning to our members decha, together with the DCC Adults, Wellbeing & Health, Learning & Development Officers with responsibility for eLearning, also offered drop-in sessions to demonstrate the packages available and to help people who had little or no experience of using IT packages. We are currently planning to offer these sessions again in order to ensure everyone who wishes to use eLearning can get past the “fear factor” associated with using a computer.

The website is regularly updated to include the latest developments within the Social Care and Health sector, decha events, news and the success of e-learning is highlighted, including how many certificates have been produced and what the most popular courses are.

Quarterly news letters are also issued to every organisation who is a member of the alliance which again includes e-learning developments, workshops available and usage figures. This always produces a surge in the number of users opting for e-learning accounts.’

This approach has proven results. Within the first year decha managed to have users complete over 2000 hours of learning. Proving that you can marketing e-learning successfully within a virtual environment.

Jackie continues:

We have some Care homes that use our e-learning courses for part of the new staff induction process. The new team members aren’t even allowed on the floor until they have completed the Safeguarding Adults course, within the Social Care and Health range.’