Podcast chat with Richard Price, Learning Technologies Advisor, NHS Health Education England
What if we could benefit from a health and care workforce educated using the most effective evidence informed technology and techniques?
This transcribe is taken from The Voctech Podcast; Subscribe and listen by searching for “The Edtech Podcast” on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Google.
Sophie: I’m absolutely delighted to be on the line with Richard Price, Learning Technologies Advisor for Health Education England. Welcome, Richard.
Richard: Hi, Sophie. Great to be here.
Sophie: As a disclaimer to our listeners, the UK is, as we record in the middle of severe weather warnings, so if you hear lots of raining in the background then that’s why. Yeah, it’s just part of the ambiance of this recording, so enjoy that.
Sophie: Before we start, a quick introduction. The mission of Health Education England is to support the delivery of excellent health care and health improvement to the patients and public of England by ensuring that the workforce of today and tomorrow has the right numbers, skills, values, and behaviours at the right time and in the right place.
Sophie: Richard’s team is an exciting sort of subset of Health Education England looking at all the future facing technologies which may help support this mission. An R&D Lab of sorts, if you will. Richard has a degree in Marine Biology from the University of Hull and a Masters in Information Technology from the University of Liverpool.
Sophie: He is also a career bridge mentor to students from the University of Hull. Richard’s biography reads something like this: I’ve crammed a lot into my career. That’s my approach to making a difference in the world. From working to improving the delivery of education, training and digital literacies with health and care organizations in the UK, advising governments in Thailand, Myanmar and Southeast Asia with the education provision to building learning with learn appeal in Kenya. I love the way technology education and training can transform lives.
Sophie: A fun story about how we set up this recording. When I was launching the Book Tech podcast, I knew I wanted an L&D professional to come on as a guest from the NHS as one of the largest employers on planet earth. With this in mind, I was delighted at the learning technology summer forum that Richard was from the NHS and that we connected. Not only that, but he also told me that he’s the listener to the Ed Tech podcast. With all that in mind, super excited to start our recording and welcome again, Richard.
Richard: Hi there, Sophie. Nice to be here.
Sophie: So Richard, before we begin, how did you end up in your current role?
Richard: Well, it’s a slightly convoluted story but I’m probably not a traditional one either. But I started off life, my undergraduate degree as you mentioned, was in Marine Biology. I was actually researching marine snails, measuring their anatomy to look at how changes in the environment can change the sex of these marines nails. It was really sort of lab based work, sat in a lab all day and I realized at that point staring down a microscope for the rest of my life was not going to be the career choice of me. It was going to have to [inaudible 00:02:50]. Something involving lots of people and getting really excited about that.
Richard: I tried lots of different things. I tried working as an estate agent for a bit, which I loved the ability to look around people’s houses and being nosy, but actually that really wasn’t, the sales bit just didn’t appeal to me at all and I wanted to do something that made a difference in the world, I guess. Working for health care, I really feel like we’re making a difference and improving people’s lives and making things better for the people that we serve across the UK and indeed the world.
Richard: Getting into learning technology as a result of that was something that I felt like I had some experience in and some background in that I could actually start to fulfill that mission of sort of helping people.
Sophie: That’s fantastic. Yeah, I guess after a while sort of snails have a limited conversational ability, should we say.
Richard: Well this is it, they’re an animal, Sophie, so it’s quite lonely work at times.
Sophie: Yeah, yeah. If I understand correctly, your R&D team sits within the Technology Enhanced Learning program at Health England and it says here the vision for that program is that patients in public in England benefit from a health and care workforce, educated using the most effective evidence informed technology and techniques. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about some of the technologies that you’ve been assessing within this capacity.
Richard: Absolutely. As a team, I think we’re really privileged to work with every part of the NHS. We get to work all the way from people working in support services like porters, working in hotel services all the way up to senior consultants, nurses, doctors, everybody, every part of the NHS, so it’s a real privilege to be involved with this.
Richard: Then to actually see how some of the technologies that we’re using actually start to have an impact on their lives and how they learn in the workplace. Some of the technologies we’ve been sort of experimenting with. We do a lot of stuff with the e-learning, and so that’s the sort of more traditional delivery method.
Richard: But we’re also sort of exploring the more innovative techniques. We’re doing a lot of stuff with virtual reality at the moment, for example. There’s a professional group called Allied Health Professionals, which are the paramedics, the podiatrists, those kinds of careers. They’re sort of under resourced and undervalued sometimes in the NHS, so we wanted to draw attention to the amazing work that those colleagues do creating these 360 videos.
Richard: We worked with Torbay Hospital where we have the virtual reality lab that we fund down there and we worked with the team there, Nick Perez and the team down there to create these incredible videos that explore what it’s like really to be one of these professions getting right to the details. They’re not, perhaps for somebody that’s got a, you have to have quite strong stomach to watch some of the videos. They’re really quite incredible, really immersive.
Richard: There’s that kind of thing. But we’re also looking a lot at sort of personalized learning, as well. Working with a lot of companies out there in the private sector at the moment to look at how artificial intelligence can drive that personalization and improves the way that we don’t just deliver one size fits all training anymore. We start to deliver training that meets the needs of the individual much more. There’s a lot of work going on in that, as well.
Richard: We also do a lot of work with sort of simulation, so that’s things like mannequins. One you’re probably familiar with is Resusci Anne. Everybody’s done the CPR training on Resusci Anne, but actually they’re much more confident. They can be a lot more sort of complicated than that and sophisticated in that. They have sensors in them. You can program the mannequins to do different things. We’re doing a lot of work in exploring that area while researching what kind of technologies and things who can support that, as well.
Sophie: That’s fascinating. As an aside, when I was coming towards the end of school starting University, I worked as a Porter in my local hospital [inaudible 00:06:27]. Yes, I mean if you want to ever experience all the different stories going on in a hospital, it’s a great way to do it, I suppose.
Richard: Recommend to anybody. You get to see the best in humanity and the worst in humanity.
Sophie: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was interesting what you said about AI and adaptive learning cause it got me thinking about the kind of variety of languages spoken both among the staff but also among patients and you know when that can become a barrier to accessing healthcare. I just wondered if you’d looked at AI in relation to sort of languages and overcoming those language barriers ever.
Richard: Absolutely. I mean, language is a big challenge and typically we deliver our content in English because that’s the language that the majority our workforce speak. But we appreciate that perhaps in patients’ cases it’s not always they’re sort of first language. Sometimes, it’s about not just making the content accessible from a technical point of view, but also looking at a language you use and making sure that it’s in a sort of simple enough way that it makes sense, that there’s no colloquialisms, those kinds of things.
Richard: But equally, we also look at how the technology might be able to drive that. We’ve been running some pilots with a company that do some artificial intelligence work and looking at sort of automatic transcription of videos and [inaudible 00:07:50] of videos. There’s absolutely some work going on in that space around that work. But I think it’s important to note that particularly for an international audience, sometimes it isn’t just about the translation of the materials. It’s also about the translation of [inaudible 00:08:06] and things, as well.
Richard: I don’t know, white, middle aged man on photo might not appeal to an audience outside of the UK for example, because they are looking for sort of localization I suppose, those images and that content.
Sophie: Yeah. Yeah. Then, do you say look at technology in relation to diagnosis within your remit?
Richard: That’s not something we would directly do. There’s an amazing report that came out earlier this year called the Topol Review. We worked with this incredible clinician from the United States called Professor Eric Topol. He’s the most charismatic man you’ll ever meet. Incredible guy. He’s a cardiac surgeon and came up with the support commissioned by the Secretary of State that looked at the whole breadth of healthcare and how that’s going to change over the next five years, 10 years, 15 years and beyond.
Richard: Looking at the tools that are out there now, also looking at the tools and technologies that are out there. Artificial Intelligence clearly has a key role to play in that, but also sort of medical devices and things like that. You can get these incredible ultrasound scanners that will plug into your phone and they cost about $1400, now. They’re really sort of almost consumer level prices. As Eric puts it, you can do a full body selfie so you can literally take an ultrasound of every part of your body and show that to your clinician.
Richard: That’s sort of how it’s going to change the way that we deliver health care. It moves from more, at the moment it’s very much clinician led, but it’s going to become much more sort of patient led, I guess. From a technology point of view, that’s going to change things, but from a delivery point of view, but we’re obviously going to have to change the way that we train the workforce as a result of that. That means looking at people’s digital capabilities and whether they’re ready to accept those challenges around that and things.
Sophie: Yeah, I mean I think it’s absolutely fascinating because I did some work in a previous life. I launched the mobile healthcare industry summit in 2009 and so this is when the Vodafone CEO was sort of looking at how we might be able to use some of our mobile phone technology at the time to, you know, if it could assist the health care sector in that way.
Sophie: Then again some work around sort of patient safety and I think Eric Topol at the time was sort of doing some of the leading work around patient safety if I’m correct. I think what he was really putting forward there was about making everyone far more comfortable with being open and transparent about when things go wrong and learning from them and advancing as a profession.
Sophie: I just wondered, cause I haven’t had a chance to read that report that came out in February, but whether that same message came through and the implications for that in terms of training, as well.
Richard: Yeah, I think it did. I think the key message throughout the whole report was actually the technology is great, but it needs to be enhanced the way that we deliver care and actually the only way you’re going to do that is to have a suitably trained workforce. We can’t leave the workforce behind, so we’ve got amazing professionals doing things within the NHS, but actually how we need to make sure that when new technology do come out, we don’t leave people behind. We make sure that that workforce of the future of today is ready for that workforce of the future and that workplace of the future.
Richard: A lot of work we’re doing now is exploring when these new technologies come on how do we ensure that that workforce is digitally capable and is digitally literate. I hesitate a little bit to use the word literacy because I think sometimes it has sort of negative messages around sort of reading and writing and that kind of thing. What we’re talking about is making sure that everybody just is comfortable using the technology and making sure that they become more adept at adapting to the available technology that when it comes out …
Richard: There’s a lovely example, we went to a GP practice in Kent. They typically have a surge of calls and a surge of visits from patients when there’s a headline in the newspapers about a particular condition.
Sophie: That’s amazing. Isn’t that amazing? It’s the same in supermarkets, isn’t it? In terms of weather, and then, you know, putting more brollies out and that kind of thing.
Richard: Absolutely. But this GP surgery, rather than sort of criticizing patients when they come in with printouts from Google with all of the symptoms that they think they have, actually working with them, they’re sort of using the top technology that’s out there sitting with them in front of the computer and going well, this is the reasons why it’s not this and you don’t need to worry, and reassuring them that way.
Richard: Actually, technology doesn’t necessarily deliver the training and deliver the training or deliver the care in those instances, but it is supporting that individual, that patient to improve their sort of lifestyle and things as a result of that.
Sophie: Well that’s really interesting because as I understand your work is quite, I was reading the blog from your team and it seems to follow a sort of agile methodology but also quite strongly focus on, you know, the end user and making sure that you’re involving them as you develop any of your services or your sort of R&D work. For people listening in, do you have any kind of advice on how to go about that? How to bring people into that process?
Richard: It can be quite tricky in healthcare because everybody’s very time poor and very stretched. Actually getting people to commit to giving us their time freely to be involved with this can be tricky. Actually, I think a lot of the time it’s appealing to people’s willingness and saying, actually this is good. This is how it’s going to improve your, the way that you can can work in a healthcare environment. That’s the kind of messages we tend to typically give to recruit people, to help them, to get them involved with our work and show that enthusiasm, that excitement that we have for what we’re doing, as well.
Sophie: Yeah, yeah. From a sort of technical point of view, when it gets to the point of, you know, maybe you’ve assessed some of these technologies, you’ve realized where there’s going to be a positive impact and then it goes more into, okay, let’s roll this out.
Sophie: If I understand correctly, the NHS is the world’s eighth largest employer. I’m sure these things go up and down, but, and I’m sure this isn’t just you responsible for doing this across everything, but how do you go about rolling out training to such a large and multigenerational workforce?
Sophie: As we talked about, some people have tons of experience perhaps are later coming to some of the digital tools and then there’s varied capabilities. How do you roll that out in such an enormous organization?
Richard: I guess there’s two challenges. There’s one that is about appealing to a mass audience that have got multiple sort of varying levels of ability. Then there’s also the challenge of how we scale some of these things up. Though a lot of the technologies that are out there, because we are so large and I think it varies quite dramatically how big of an employer we are. Currently, we’re the eighth. I think we were sort of third last year. It just varies quite a lot. [crosstalk 00:15:13]
Sophie: I think mine was global, so I think it’s third in the UK. Yeah.
Richard: It’s usually, I don’t know, McDonald’s and Walmart, they’re usually above us. But yeah, like I say, it’s a huge and very [crosstalk 00:15:24].
Sophie: I won’t say it’s a production line from McDonald’s into the NHS. That would be naughty.
Richard: Absolutely. I mean cardiac surgery is very different to delivering a cheeseburger I guess. But yeah, these are sort of challenges I guess around the sort of scalability of all of these things. The NHS structure is devolved into a number of sort of units called NHS trusts and there are about 600 across the UK. Ultimately, at a local level, it’s up to whether an individual organization decides to go with our recommendation based on the research that we’ve done.
Richard: But we do also procure things at a national level, as well. We have a platform called e-learning for health care, for example, which probably one of the largest learning management systems in the world, I guess. We’ve got about a million registered users on there that can access free content for everybody working in the NHS. There’s resources on there all ranging all the way from sort of compliance training stuff. [inaudible 00:16:17] mandatory, which I’m sure we’re all familiar with, all the way through to sort of very niche things around tracheotomy care or cancer care, those kinds of things.
Richard: That’s available on a national level and that’s procured at a national level. Some of that material goes on to those national platforms. But like I say, to address the other part of the question around some of the varying capabilities, I think this is one of the things we discovered. One of the things we’ve would be working on for probably the last two years now is looking at what sort of digital capabilities the workforce now has and what they’re going to need in the future.
Richard: It’s not a simple case of rolling out training that’s one size fits all. That’s where the division comes in, I guess. But what we’re finding is typically there isn’t a sort of typical user and average user. People have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others. If you think about a child, ten-year-old will have great technical ability and they’ll be able to use an Apple iPhone or something smart galaxy phone far better than you or I could, but they probably don’t know how to use that safety and security.
Richard: There are different capabilities there, whereas you or I, Sophie would have much better technical safety and security. But this is be able to distinguish between your sort of personal identity and professional identity. These are skills that we’re having to upscale, so it’s not a one size fits all solution. We’ve developed what we’re calling the digital capability framework and which is available on our website and tells you and has six of capability delivery back somebody to have.
Richard: The sort of research in there, there’s the ability to do blogging and communication and things like that. Technical skills that are relevant now, but hopefully will be relevant into the future as well as we enter this sort of new age of medicine where we’ve got personalized medicine, we’ve got genomic medicine. All these incredible sort of advances in in technology where we’re working towards the sort of Star Trek style tricorder where you can point and it tells you what’s wrong with them.
Richard: This sounds like science fiction, but this stuff’s coming so we need to be ready for that kind of thing. There’s a great guy I follow on Twitter. I’m reading his book at the moment called [Bursy 00:18:29] [Masco 00:00:18:29]. He calls himself a medical futurist. He’s a doctor from, I think he’s from Poland, from memory, and he has these sort of incredible insights into what new medical devices are coming and we’re obviously following people like him to see where the changes are going to need to take place within the healthcare workforce, as well.
Sophie: Absolutely. Yeah, I remember I was in digital health care LinkedIn group, which has grown tremendously since I started Burton. I remember even back in late, well, 2009 early sort of 2010 and even then the FDA in the States was, you know, suddenly the smartphone became something that was regulated under sort of the healthcare sector because of its ability to act as a medical device. Some really interesting kind of fallout implications as well as all these things develop.
Richard: Absolutely. Here in the UK, we have the National Institute, you can collect excellence who performance in the role to the FDA. They similarly consider certain things on smartphones to be medical devices, so we need to be careful with that. But I don’t think we can underestimate how important actually things like smartphones and all of these sort of personal devices are to learn those, as well. Increasingly we’re finding, and we’re working towards maturity to see another benchmark at the moment around this. We’re increasingly finding that there’s lots of use of personal devices and to support education and training. But I should stress not in the sort of clinical context. I think in a clinical environment and have to be much more regulated than that.
Richard: It’s a great tool that allows time for clinicians to be able to think about paramedics, be able to access learning on the go in an ambulance while they’re on standby waiting in a lay by waiting for [inaudible] to come in. I worked for an ambulance service for a number of years and that was one of the things that we were really keen on how we made that learning accessible to that sort of audience that start potentially with a little bit of time on their hands, but not enough to be able to return to station and do any formal learning, I mean, but be able to access bite-size videos, that kind of stuff. We’re looking at the technology that’s out there to support that, as well.
Sophie: I guess as a further point there, which is your thinking about audit trails is how do you go about actually assessing the impact of these technologies and deciding whether to progress them or if they’re kind of the, you know, they’re too early stage to kind of move forward?
Richard: We have a number of methods I suppose. We have an academic partner that we work with that keeps an academic rigor to our work. We don’t just go and buy a nice gadget and try it. We do actually try and do a proper study as to the impact of that technology.
Richard: I suppose with virtual reality in particular, there’s usually a wow factor associated with that, which is great because it gets people engaged with learning. It gets them excited about learning. But actually, that isn’t necessarily the outcome that we want to achieve. Just because someone’s excited about the technology doesn’t mean that it’s going to have the same impact as say a classroom course, for example. For example, there’s fire safety training, it’s a topic everybody has to do. I’m thinking on that as perhaps an example of something that we might want to do.
Richard: If we were to deliver fire safety training via virtual reality, it would have the wow impact. But would it have the same impact in terms of learning outcomes? That’s something we would have to do. We would take some data from the current delivery method which might be learning or classroom training and we would compare that to a similar data set from learners based on their sort of knowledge retention. We would have to, we would make sure there’s some academic rigor to that and make sure that there is actually some value to implement technology rather than just implementing technology for the sake of technology.
Richard: I suppose there’s two ways of looking at this. I think sometimes people say, well, it should be all about the education. Yes of course it should all be about the education, but actually I think sometimes the technology drives the education path, as well. Like when a new technology comes out, I don’t think he should be dismissed as sort of technology. That’s really our role, I suppose, to look at that what those merging technology’s are and see whether there is an impact of those technologies.
Sophie: Absolutely. I think we can be dismissive on both sides. Can’t we? You know, you can get so obsessed with being in a camp and being a purist. And actually, I think it’s about whether you can use that tool within the context that you work.
Richard: Absolutely. Yeah.
Sophie: I sort of mentioned in your biography that you also work on an e-Learning project called Learn Appeal. I just wondered, I know it’s slightly outside of your kind of day-to-day role, but whether you might be able to tell us a little bit about that.
Richard: Yeah, when I first started this conversation with you, I sort of said that I wanted a job where I was actually trying to make a difference in the world. I think that’s kind of driving everything that I do, I suppose, as well. Learned Appeals is an amazing charity that has been set up from the e-Learning community across the UK. It’s called the e-Learning Industry charity. The lady that runs it, Leslie Price, who’s no relation of mine, but she is an incredible lady that has set up this charity and is trying to turn Internet in a box basically and make that available to people all over the world.
Richard: When we’re talking about Internet in a box, what we’ve got is a about the size of a child’s lunchbox. Within that you’ve got a wireless router, a battery pack and on there is a learning management system that broadcast to people within the sort of 200 meter radius. That little learning management system sits on a little micro SD card and on there is a load of content, as well that have been created. I should stress, these are really poor communities that we’re working with. We’re talking about communities in Kenya for example, that have very little or no access to the Internet and are, I suppose, information poor as a result of that. They’re information poor in that they don’t have the same access to the knowledge that perhaps those of us in the West take for granted.
Richard: We’re trying to sort of address that balance a little bit by giving access to these Internet in a box and giving access to the tools, the technologies that we all have access to. Part of that is developing e-Learning content that’s really going to help those communities. I got involved with Learn Appeal about two or three years ago now, porting them with the work that they’re doing by writing content for them.
Richard: It’s not an area where I have any particular knowledge. I was acting purely as a sort of instructional designer in these cases, but we were developing content around water management for example, and rain water collection. These are fairly sort of basic fundamental skills that people in Kenya, in this community in Kenya really needed. We were developing content to support them with that.
Richard: I actually ended up having to, because there’s so little information online about this and so little imagery and things available, I actually ended up building a rain water collector in my back garden that I took photos off to include in the learning. It was very practical, very hands on development. Something that genuinely, I think we’ve really helped a lot of people with that and we’re gonna save lives and help people.
Sophie: If people want to find out more about that side of things as well, how can they find out?
Richard: A cracking website learnappeal.com and you can access all the material on there including a little video that shows Eric Kamora who is one of the people on the ground in Kenya and has access to all of the learning materials and talking about his sort of real experience of using that on the ground.
Sophie: Final question is if there are other L&D professionals listening in, what would be your message to them with regards to the role of tech?
Richard: I think technology has the power to bridge a lot of gaps between those that perhaps have accessibility needs and things. I think that’s one of the incredible things about the worldwide web and the Internet. Actually, we’ve gone from, if you think about putting accessibility into a physical building, you have to build ramps and things for people that have accessibility needs. With the Internet, you don’t have those kinds of barriers. If you build stuff correctly then you can really bridge those gaps. I think that’s an incredible thing about learning technology as well that if we do it right, we can make learning available to everybody regardless of wealth, regardless of ability.
Richard: My message, I guess, would be to keep pursuing that and show that that’s not always at the heart of everything that you do. Technology really is the great enabler and I think this is a fantastic opportunity we have with technology and education.
Sophie: Just finally, what’s been new at some of your favorite episodes of the Ed Tech Podcast?
Richard: Oh, you’re putting me on the spot now [inaudible 00:29:07] listening. I listened to on a couple of weeks ago. I really like the idea of the European Ed Tech Network and I’ve joined up. That was a really great podcast. I was also listening to one from a few weeks ago where you were interviewing people from the Philippines from Canada. I’m just hearing about this sort of different international perspectives on education and training and not just in a workplace context as well. I think that’s really important that actually we learn from all of the different sectors out there. We find out what’s going on across the spectrum.
Sophie: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Looking forward to publishing this and getting out your interview.
Richard: Thanks Sophie.
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