NHS South West have commissioned the development of a new virtual learning platform provided by a consortium of Tribal Consulting Limited together with King’s College London and Skills for Health. This will offer a range of learning across various care pathways including dementia.

The Learning4Health programme is designed to ensure that health and social care staff in the South West have access to a variety of learning products to help them develop or enhance their skills and competencies to deliver effective high quality patient care and services now and in the future.

Blended learning is underpinned by an e-learning platform, designed by Tribal, which will provide access to the majority of content and tools for learner support and will facilitate multi-disciplinary learning with social networking functionality across seven agreed healthcare pathways.

Importantly, in addition to the provision of a wide range of learning products both specialist and generic, the platform enables both the individual learner and their organisation to see available options and for line managers to share progress made. The system provides tools to build up ‘networks’ of interest amongst the workforce to enhance social learning experiences allowing individuals to share their learning challenges, suggest solutions, provide support as well as expressing views, ideas and experiences through online Forums, Wikis, Blogs and learning communities.