Case Study: Safety GPS Replaces eLearning with Performance Support

How competent do learners need to be?

That significant question ought to be answered, thoughtfullyand thoroughly, before instructional designers get to work.

Why? Because sometimes training isn’t needed—or learners aresuccessfully completing training but failing to meet learning or performancegoals. For some performance goals, performance support in the form of job aidsor just-in-time learning tools might be preferable to a more formal trainingmodule.

One example is safety compliance training. Molly Petroff isan education specialist at Saint Vincent Health System in Erie, Pennsylvania. Shedesigned—and her team created—an online tool that makes a strong argument forreplacing some safety and emergency training with performance support.

Hospitals are big, complicated places. “Safety” is a hugeumbrella. Employees need to know how to deal with myriad situations: how toevacuate patients during a fire or other emergency, how to handle a spill of adangerous substance, where and when to use emergency resuscitation equipment,even how to locate and use a fire extinguisher. Every department has differentpolicies and procedures and a different layout—meaning that equipment is storedin different places—and staffers are likely to encounter different types ofemergencies and safety issues. To top it all off, some staff, like nurses andtechs, might rotate among departments.

It’s just not practical to expect every staffer to learn andmaster—memorize—every potential procedure. But safety training is mandatory,and the hospital can get dinged on accreditation and other required inspectionsif staffers can’t demonstrate knowledge of safety or emergency procedures. Andit’s just common sense to want staffers to feel comfortable and competent whenfaced with an emergency, an accident, or any safety-related incident orquestion.

At Saint Vincent, staffers were consistently meetingtraining goals, but sometimes showed deficiencies in performance. “Theproblem was people did not remember everything in the training that surveyorschose to ask about,” Petroff said in an email conversation.

Asking the right questions

Petroff said that her team approaches instructional designprojects by asking the right questions. “Our first question is always, ‘Is thisa performance issue? Do you want this training because people are not doingsomething they should be doing, or are they doing something wrong?’” she said.

If they determine that the issue is performance, theyrespond by planning and designing a performance support tool. If not, then thenext step is deciding whether there is a need for education—eLearning—orinformation dissemination.

The team might determine that the solution demands bothtraining and performance support. In that case, Petroff said, they develop aneLearning solution, “being sure to incorporate the performance support into theeducation, so people know how to use it when they return to work.”

When the hospital had performance citations in a safetyinspection, they decided to develop a performance support tool to address the problem,rather than continue with the training that wasn’t working.

Deploying Safety GPS

Petroff’s solution, Safety GPS, is available on allcomputers and tablets, everywhere in the hospital. Every staffer has access andlearns how to use Safety GPS.

“The Safety GPS is intended to be an immediately accessibleresource with answers to any emergency or safety related performance challengesthat staff may have,” Petroff said. “Resources available in the Safety GPS aretailored to staff role and ‘just enough’ information for people to get back totheir performance as quickly as possible. Additional information is availableif the user decides they need it, but the initial assistance served up to the useris as concise as possible.”

The flexible design of Safety GPS puts control in thelearners’ hands. Safety GPS offers detailed procedures for every department andany type of safety or emergency situation, but in a format that makes it easyfor users to access as much (or as little) information as they need. Need toknow how to use a fire extinguisher? Find the instructions in under a minute.Need to know the evacuation procedure for the cardio wing? That, too, isfindable. Terms are defined, step-by-step instructions are available, and mapsare linked. Users can quickly drill down to the level of detail they need.Robust search capability and clear design place all the needed information atemployees’ fingertips—while leaving them free to ignore procedures that areirrelevant to them, and not demanding that people memorize vast amounts ofinformation that they may never be called on to use.

Safety GPS replaces thick manuals that no one ever read andthat could require considerable time to search through for the correct processor instructions. Training on using Safety GPS replaces mandatory compliancetraining that people completed mechanically—and promptly forgot. Best of all,instead of dull training that makes people roll their eyes and look for ways toescape, employees get to do short “scavenger hunts.” They meet safety trainingand performance requirements by demonstrating that they can quickly find anypiece of information, no matter how arcane.

“The surveyors are actually OK with people not knowing an answer right away,as long as they know where to find it within a reasonable amount of time,”Petroff said. “That was not the case when we relied on policy books andprocedure manuals.”