HSE - COVID Vaccinator Training - National Mass Vaccination Centres

Health Service Executive (HSE) 

Vaccinator Training

BACKGROUND 

In February 2021, the Health Service Executive (HSE) was faced with a huge challenge. It needed to train a large number of vaccinators at short notice to support vaccination centres throughout Ireland for the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines. The HSE working group asked VISION Consulting (VISION) to fulfil a key mobilisation and coordination role at the centre of this sourcing and training process to train 2,500 vaccinators within two months, and a total of 5,000 vaccinators within six months. The programme involved coordinating closely with the relevant medical regulatory bodies, national recruiters and other sourcing partners internal HSE teams, and a training partner with national reach.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES 

Based on VISION’s track record of delivering challenging projects with multiple stakeholders on time, on budget and with all the promised deliverables, VISION readily accepted the invitation. 

The challenge was as follows: 

1 Design: To design and implement the sourcing and training process as a series of steps through which candidates were promoted from initial sourcing through to completion of all training.

2 Training Courses: To coordinate the preparation and delivery of courses for 11 clinical disciplines, six student disciplines, with up to five online courses and three face-to-face courses to be completed by candidates (depending on their discipline). The face-to-face training was mobilised with a national training partner in 24 locations around the country and seven days per week as required.

3 Sourcing: VISION worked with a number of national scale recruitment organisations in addition to proven HSE companies to source the candidates. The challenge with this part of the process was to recruit and train candidates in the correct numbers and in the correct locations to meet the needs of the vaccination centres located around the country.

4 Regulatory Bodies:  VISION coordinated across six clinical regulatory bodies, from getting their sign-off on the training material, to how their members would be treated and who could contact them. The VISION team worked with all of the following bodies: Irish Medical Council for Doctors, Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland for Pharmacists, Nursery and Midwifery Board of Ireland for Nurses & Midwives, Irish Dental Council for Dentists & Dental Hygienists, Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council for Paramedics, Advanced Paramedics & Emergency Medical Technicians and CORU (the Health and Social Care Professionals Council for physiotherapists, optometrists, physical therapists, radiographers and radiation therapists).

5 Reporting: VISION mobilised the data from recruiters, training partner and regulatory bodies to design a reporting structure that provided:

• Trusted, simple-to-interpret weekly progress reporting that happened like clockwork.

• The number of candidates being supplied from each of the sourcing organisations. 

• The number of candidates at each of the training stages.

• The number of candidates engaged in, or who had completed, their face-to-face or online training phases.

And the number of candidates who had completed all phases of training.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

THE VISION APPROACH

The most valuable skills that we brought to this engagement were our abilities to:

• Understanding the requirement of the HSE to get training up and running as quickly as possible. This was achieved by a rapid assessment of the status of the project and the outstanding elements yet to be initiated.

• Mobilising the outstanding elements extraordinarily quickly. These included:

• Creating an immediate momentum in the project by completing face-to-face training of vaccinators within the first week (20 candidates) with multiples of that in subsequent weeks (see below). 

• This one-week pilot showed VISION how things would work on the ground, and helped to identify additional processes and relationships that were required

• Mobilising a training partner within a week of beginning the VISION team engagement – within two weeks, the training partner was able to train vaccinator candidates at a rate of 75 in week two, 150 in week three, and 400 in week four. 

• Mobilising the sourcing of candidates and completion of a skill assessment process within one week of being on the project.

• Coordinating with partners and specifically with clinical regulatory bodies in deciding on the content of training courses for each clinical discipline.

• VISION did not need complex IT systems and reporting systems to get started, or to scale up. Instead the team used simple systems to get started fast, at low cost and to provide a basis for any future permanent systems.

• Supporting people and building strong teams. The HSE, HSE associates, externals and VISION teams had not worked together before but our approach built relationships quickly. 

• The VISION team brought difficult, critical decisions to the wider team. Because of the specialist skills required in clinical matters, encouraging the delegation of some of these decisions was especially important.

• VISION meeting practices focused on action, team building and blunt, frank exchanges when required. These meetings happened daily for the VISION team (30 mins) and once per week for 60 mins with the full team. We adjusted the daily frequency as pressures grew and eased.

• Reporting on the numbers weekly along with the training run-rates built trust with the senior management team and reduced ad hoc queries from anxious stakeholders.

SERVICE DELIVERY

Over six months, VISION and their partners engaged with 10,000 candidates and, of the 5,000 vaccinators who completed training, 3,000 were placed in vaccination centres around the country.

In the early stages of the programme, before the clinical teams were brought on board, the VISION team managed to field large numbers of queries and concerns, while still getting the programme up and running.

Working in parallel or entirely out of sequence, the team managed risks highly effectively – for instance, organising training locations before numbers of candidates were known.

Daily deadlines and weekly targets were set – and met consistently. The use of VISION’;s  ‘rolling planning’  practice ensured that the team were always looking three weeks ahead.

This also required staying flexible and changing approaches as and when required. For instance, the team focused on small numbers in the first two weeks of training execution to explore conditions on the ground and test relationships, before switching to high-volume, face-to-face training to build momentum fast. And then, as it emerged that this alone would not be sufficient, the team switched to online training.

CONTRACT PERFORMANCE 

OUTCOMES 

Despite the huge challenges, the project was an outstanding success. VISION achieved the goal of training 5,000 vaccinators by the end of July 2021.