As health policies evolve, employees need to undergo the necessary training to offer top-notch quality services, like learning effective ways to assist clients with medication. Lack of training can have consequences such as compliance failure and relatively higher error rates. Therefore it’s crucial that effective training is emphasized to lower the risks and enhance care quality.

5 Effective Practices to Train Your Employees

There are several ways to go about keeping your employees up to date, depending on the type of policy or strategy in question.

1. Comprehensive Training Programs

You shouldn’t wait for new policies and strategies to initiate training programs for your employees. Even if there are no policy changes, the training programs should be comprehensive enough to reinforce those already in place.

You can use different learning techniques like interactive sessions, webinars, and practical workshops to remind your staff of basic standard operating procedures and how to handle emergencies. Lastly, ensure that the training is accessible to all the staff members irrespective of their role in your healthcare organization.

You can also evaluate your staff’s operational skills and clinical competencies through performance review, patient feedback, and direct observation. Having access to this kind of data will help in identifying the areas that need improvement.

2. Tech Training

Technology has become more integral to healthcare in today’s world. Employees need to learn about using practice management software, telehealth platforms, electronic health records (EHR) and so much more.

This will reflect in their accuracy and efficiency when it comes to employee compliance in administrative tasks and patient care. The EHR, for instance, enables your clinical and administrative staff to adapt to managing data entry and retrieval, all while complying with privacy regulations.

When it comes to dealing with administrative functions, billing, and scheduling, practice management software comes in handy. Your team should also be able to manage telehealth technologies to allow them to offer high-quality patient care remotely.

3. Set up Effective Communication Channels

There should be regular communication channels whose purpose is solely to keep your staff informed on the latest revisions, updates, and other changes related to procedures and policies. This could be notice boards, team meetings, email notifications, or monthly newsletters. The consistent information will help reinforce the important adherence and keep the new strategies and policies fresh in the minds of the employees.

Some companies go about this through microlearning, where content is delivered in the form of flashcards and quizzes, which are ideal for learning on the go. Some apps offer this type of daily microlearning, allowing for a less intrusive and more manageable channel for passing crucial information.

4. Ensure Mandatory Compliance

To ensure that your training is well executed and effective enough to bear fruit, it has to be mandatory. For health organizations, there can be consequences if training is not adhered to properly. This includes damage to the organization’s reputation, legal penalties, and financial losses.

When new employees come in, comprehensive training should be offered to them to ensure they are well-versed with the standards of the organization from the very beginning. The seasoned staff should also receive regular updates should there be changes to ensure there’s informed compliance.

The training sessions should shed light on the ethical and legal conduct that is required by law. Among the mandatory compliance include:

• HIPAA compliance, which ensures the security and privacy of PHI (Patient health information),
• OSHA training that promotes safe work environments to prevent workplace injuries, and
• CMC compliance, which ensures you adhere to the standards put up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

5. Assessing Your Training Effectiveness

The final step is to evaluate the impact of your training regularly. Before you even begin your training, you need to assess how you would measure success. This can involve analyzing how sufficiently the training covers the intended topics and its impact on employees’ performance.

Also, consider asking yourself these questions. What is your aim? Are you looking to reduce error rates, enhance compliance adherence, and improve patient satisfaction scores? Doing this beforehand will help you establish a clear metric to allow you to measure the impact of training.

Takeaway

Training your staff on new policies and procedures is best done with a multifaceted approach. Repetitive and continuous education and training are essential in healthcare when it comes to upholding high patient care standards. However, you have to keep in mind the training needs and implement various learning methods. Lastly, don’t forget to assess the effectiveness of your training too.