Hi
I was wondering how people are working with this on Qpulse. We currently have a number of paper based competency lists. These give the specific competency and next to this the level (i.e. observed, performs, competent, fully competent). We will sign and date against each level as it is completed.
QP5 seems to operate in the opposite fashion. i.e. you set a level and then assign the specific competencies to this. Trying to implement the above means that you have to enter each competency multiple times (i.e for each level). This means that you end up with a lot of typing and a very long list.
I would be interested to know how people are using the competency part of QP5 as it currently doesn't seem to be very efficient.
Regards
Dudley
Good points Dudley,
As it happens, we are not using the competency part, as it doesn't match up to our requirements, and we cannot get the necessary reports from it.
KB
We have tried to adapt to the Competency issue in Q-Pulse 5 by defining levels globally. Everyone hired gets Level 1. The courses in any given level do not repeat in any other level.
Level 1:Basic regulatory required training that each employee must receive upon hire, agency orientation and departmental orientation. Includes items like: lock-out/tag out, Personal Protective Equipment, Emergency evacuation plans, Communicable diseases.
Level 2: Administrative/Clerical/Support staff: Includes items like: First Aid, Inventory/Annual, Mainframe/Server Back-up, Q-Pulse Software Overview, Shipping/Receiving Logs, Phone System ...
The process I've seen most customers adopt is as follows:
1. Competency created with multiple levels of achievement (beginner, intermediate, expert, etc)
2. Requirement of completing a course added to the competency level.
3. The course is scheduled in training and then once complete the person record is updated to show "competent".
As Sonya mentioned, you can have these created and then assigned to a job role so that when a new member of staff is taken on they are automatically assigned with the requirements of their position. It can take some time to configure initially but once setup you will be able to add new staff relatively easily.
Has anyone else been using the training module in a different process?
Alan BlairSupport Engineer, Gael LtdE: support@gaelquality.com || T: +44 1355 593400
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I am a user in th UK Healthcare (Medical Laboratories) sector, where competence assessment has just been given added importance by the new version of Clinical Pathology Accreditation standards that require regular competence assessment for all members of staff at all levels.
We have a pretty good system for this already, but it is paper-based, which presents real problems. I would like to replace this with A QPulse system eventually and am particularly encouraged by the ability to create training event based on documents (SOPs for us). The events can then be given a default renewal period & this can then be varied per individual depending on their role & rotation plan.
The problem is that, like the other posters here, QPulse uses a hierarchy where events are attached to competency levels. This is OK so far as it goes and actually works quite well with the UK NHS Knowledge & Skills Framework competence assessment framework that is used throughout the NHS. The problem is that we already have a national e-KSF database that we are told we must use for KSF assessment. This does not fulfil the requirement to assess competence in specific procedures, however and this is often of more immediate importance to medical labs (e.g. ensuring that personnel rotating around several labs maintain competence).
What we would really like is the ability to attach a competence score to training events or to specific procedures. The only way I can see of doing this at the moment (other than by doing it on paper & attaching documents) would be to customise one of the fields used to score a training event. At present there are fields for scoring the trainer, the event & an overall score. We would probably want to retain the first two and the overall score does not seem to be calculated from the other two, so I could rename this as Comeptence Score. We would then have to train users to score this on a scale of 1-4. I can foresee a hitch though since trainees can edit these fields (the aim being to assess competence of the trainer), which you would not want in order to prevent people hiking their own scores! It would also be quite difficult to get the scores out in a report.
Hmm - better submit this in the developments wanted thread
Gary Cheung
Quality & Risk Manager
Department of Haematological Medicine
King's College Hospital
garycheung@kch.nhs.uk
I am a relatively new user (UK Halthcare - Medical Lab) to Q-Pulse, and have been looking at implementing both the People and Training Courses modules to replace hardcopy training portfolios.
Thus far I have created master events which are based on our SOPs (we are talking hundreds, as we a large reference laboratory). Each master event has then been categorised to a particular competency (defined in event categories), based upon the KSF framework e.g. biomediccal & investigation, health, safety & security etc. I have gone as far as to group several procedures to a category (commpetency) e.g. biomeical investigation>manual EIA (several SOPs therefore fall under one competency). This is the basis for our competency assessments as directed by CPA - We competency assess on a grouped competency.
Each master event is then linked to a competency, which as users have already pointed out links it to a competency level. It is difficult to establish in a laboratory setting what constitutes a specific level - I realise i am posting neearly a year after the first post, have any lessons been learnt? What have other users done since?
We have started to schedule events using the training courses modules, these are based on SOPs, but also often based on other training requirements. I have noticed that scheduled events do not appear in an individuals training plan, do these have to be added manually to the training plan? Also when a training requirement is complete it does not populate the event history, does this also have to be completed manually? How are other users using the training plan? I am looking to drive the training plan purely from the annual review process.
Beacuase the department is so large >100 staff, I have had to create a spreadsheet that users fill in once they have been signed off against a particular SOP. An administrator then updates the event history in Q-Pulse. This is not the most efficient system, and I would be interested to know how others are managing their systems.
I realise I have asked alot of questions! But any input/feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Imtiaz
We are currently in the process of designing how our training process will work in Q-Pulse. As we are a manufacturing facility, we also have the problem of multiple competency levels required on each manufacturing document ie Observe, Complete Under supervision, Fully competent. As we need a large amount of flexibility of how each operative is trained in the manufacture of different products, the best work around I've found is to set up training events for each level of each document, and then group them all together as a competency i.e competency is called "Product A - Observe" and this contains requirements for all the documents involved in the manufacture of Product A at observe level. Another competency would then be set up for Product A - Complete under Supervision with the associated requirements, Product A - Fully Competent etc.
It will be fairly intensive to set this up with all the associated training events but it is the only way I've discovered to record all levels of training with the flexibility to allow cross training on certain procedures etc.
Anyone else come up with a way of adapting Q-Pulse for this kind of scenario?
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