For almost 150 years, Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) at Temple Street has been one of Ireland’s foremost pediatric hospitals, treating an estimated 145,000 children each year. 

Always striving to promote and provide the best child-centered, research-led learning, the CHI at Temple Street team wanted to tackle an urgent issue affecting 80,000+ people – health problems due to child and adolescent obesity. 

Partnering with LearnUpon as part of its Social Impact initiative, the Child and Adolescent Weight Management Service in CHI at Temple Street launched online obesity training on World Obesity Day, 2020. Along with receiving incredible feedback and smashing training targets, the program is, most importantly, empowering healthcare professionals to have a meaningful impact on their patients’ lives.

The challenge: Tackling childhood and adolescent obesity through learning

The CHI team members and wider Sláintecare project team (a health and social care program) want to give every patient and their family the best treatment possible, regardless of the care needed. However, they saw a huge knowledge gap in the healthcare industry.

With the rapid increase in childhood and adolescent obesity over the past two decades, most healthcare professionals across Ireland hadn’t received the proper training to confidently help their patients. 

To help the healthcare system “catch up”, Grace led a Sláintecare project to develop an ambitious plan: offer evidence-based training on obesity to every healthcare professional working with children and adolescents in Ireland – including general practitioners, nurses, psychiatrists, dietitians, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, pediatricians, psychologists, and surgeons. And to manage the training, they needed an easy-to-use online learning solution that would help the team deliver the training nationwide.

Solution: Partnering with LearnUpon to make a real impact

After reaching out to LearnUpon, it was clear that both organizations had found the perfect partnership. For the Weight Management Team in CHI at Temple Street, it was the right solution to deliver its high-impact training.

For the LearnUpon team, through its Social Impact initiative, it was an opportunity to support an organization making a positive change in the world.

Since launch, the training has been in constant high-demand. The original aim was 150 learners in the first year, and the team’s targets were quickly blown out of the water, with 4x more healthcare professionals trained than estimated.

The platform + the people

For Grace, the reason for their success with LearnUpon is twofold – the platform and the people. 

With the solution, the team creates learner-focused content in their authoring tool, Articulate. This content is effortlessly added to LearnUpon, where assessment and completion requirements are set for learners. Critically, it’s all mobile-friendly for on-the-go healthcare workers too.

With the CHI at Temple Street team being busy healthcare providers themselves, LearnUpon takes learning micromanagement off their plate. With features like automated certification and self-enrollment, Grace and her team can set it and forget it, confident in the knowledge that the training is being delivered.

For Grace and her team, it’s not just about training delivery, it’s also about the insights they can get back from the healthcare workers. Using LearnUpon’s survey, quiz, and rating tools, each learner is asked to do a knowledge check and give feedback in order to assess and improve the impact of the training.

The real value for the Weight Management Team in CHI at Temple Street is the relationship with the LearnUpon team. From implementation to launch to support requests, when compared to other solutions “LearnUpon just had a different vibe”, says Grace.

The future: Continuing to provide the best child-centered, research-led learning with LearnUpon

Looking ahead, LearnUpon has unlocked the power of online learning for CHI at Temple Street. Now, with an LMS in hand, the Weight Management team can see endless opportunities to expand the learning offering and, most importantly, increase the positive impact healthcare workers can have on the lives of children and their families.