Partnership offers free e-leaning resource for UK NHS organisations

Health Education England (HEE) has boosted its e-learning portfolio for the health and care workforce, by partnering with FutureLearn.com to provide short courses to the NHS for free.

The partnership means fees are waived for all NHS-authored courses on FutureLearn. HEE is the lead partner, though all NHS organisations in the UK have the option to create courses and then make these available via the FutureLearn platform.

The new partnership consolidates several existing partnerships between different NHS organisations and FutureLearn, to provide a unified experience for learners and making it easier for health and care organisations to create courses.

Neil Ralph, Head of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) at Health Education England, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to take the social learning experience offered by FutureLearn and make this available to more people in the health and care workforce.  This new partnership complements the existing NHS learning platforms provided by HEE TEL including elearning for healthcare, the Learning Hub and Digital Learning Solutions.”

Health Education England’s TEL team is already providing high quality education at scale including more than 400 elearning programmes via the elearning for healthcare Hub, the Learning Hub hosts a variety of resources that have been contributed by the health and care workforce and the Digital Learning Solution supports over 300 health and care organisations with a focus on clinical systems training and generic IT skills learning.  The addition of the FutureLearn partnership to the existing offer strengthens the catalogue of online learning opportunities for the health and care workforce.

Justin Cooke, Chief Content and Partnerships Officer at FutureLearn, said: “FutureLearn is delighted to continue building on its relationship with Health Education England, a global healthcare training and education leader. We have already seen our wide range of healthcare courses reach millions of professionals around the world, with more than 100,000 enrolments across HEE’s portfolio alone. As we extend our partnership to the wider NHS family, our shared goal is to now open up access to many more valuable training and development opportunities that healthcare professionals can truly benefit from.” 

To create a course, you must be an NHS organisation in the UK. Please contact tel@hee.nhs.uk to discuss joining the partnership. The courses which are currently eligible as part of the partnership are available on the Learning Hub: https://learninghub.nhs.uk/catalogue/futurelearn