Compassly

Healthcare Professionals

Who want to develop their skills throughout their careers, have their abilities recognised & have access to the best standards of training.

The challenge for healthcare professionals

The unique responsibilities of healthcare professional development

Healthcare professionals are different to staff in most other industries when it comes to professional development. In most jobs you are recruited by your employer, and from that point onwards your training and performance is purely a matter for your employer – if they don’t do it well enough, that’s technically their problem. You probably won’t enjoy doing your job badly and stalling professionally (and you’ll probably quit eventually), but that’s the limit of your responsibility.

In healthcare there is an expectation (and in many cases a legal requirement) for healthcare professionals to maintain professional standards themselves, irrespective of where they work. This creates a situation that just doesn’t apply in most other industries:

• Maintenance of the required standards and ongoing professional development are the individual’s responsibility, not just the employing organisation’s. Failure to maintain these standards could lead to the individual losing their right to work in that profession altogether
• Individuals need to be able to track their historical learning and compliance records, and present these as evidence where required (including professional revalidation)
• Professional standards and training can be set by the employing organisation, but equally they may come from an external body and extend beyond any one employer
• Employees may have been working towards external professional standards before joining an organisation and continue doing so after they have left – professional development doesn’t always fall neatly into one period of employment
• There is a moral imperative to share professional development and performance information between organisations – whereas in the wider world, no employer has any obligation to tell anybody else about an historic employee’s skills or performance

These are special, specific conditions that most generic professional development systems don’t even consider, let alone solve.

Increasingly healthcare professionals are required to keep extensive personal records of professional development outside of their employment. Whether to satisfy regulators (such as revalidating with the NMC), keep track of your own training and certification needs, or to build up your professional credentials – the need to keep track of your paperwork is growing and growing for healthcare professionals.

Reproving your skills at a new organisation – whether for a new substantive role or just filling a specific shift – is demotivating and a waste of time. And it’s not just your time – it’s the people assessing you too, both taken away from doing direct healthcare work to do paperwork. And worst of all, that time away for both of you from patients and caring.

As the quote in tech goes: “The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from”. But it’s a problem in healthcare too; professional standards and qualifications sit on different systems, in various folders or just not recorded formally at all. Standards change, and keeping track of this is tough. And this is all hard to navigate; healthcare doesn’t lack information, but finding that which is relevant for your role is incredibly tough.

Hospital groups employ thousands – even tens of thousands – of people. Healthcare is adapting to new ways of working – Integrated Care Systems, hospital chains and services shared across NHS trusts. Alongside this, healthcare professionals are taking on more flexible ways of working – with individual roles that span multiple organisations, portfolio careers or the clinical gig economy (bank, agency and locum shifts).

  • Your own personal pile of paperwork
  • It’s not just your time you’re wasting
  • Finding the right standards
  • Getting lost in the organisation

Increasingly healthcare professionals are required to keep extensive personal records of professional development outside of their employment. Whether to satisfy regulators (such as revalidating with the NMC), keep track of your own training and certification needs, or to build up your professional credentials - the need to keep track of your paperwork is growing and growing for healthcare professionals.

Reproving your skills at a new organisation - whether for a new substantive role or just filling a specific shift - is demotivating and a waste of time. And it’s not just your time - it’s the people assessing you too, both taken away from doing direct healthcare work to do paperwork. And worst of all, that time away for both of you from patients and caring.

As the quote in tech goes: “The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from”. But it’s a problem in healthcare too; professional standards and qualifications sit on different systems, in various folders or just not recorded formally at all. Standards change, and keeping track of this is tough. And this is all hard to navigate; healthcare doesn’t lack information, but finding that which is relevant for your role is incredibly tough.

Hospital groups employ thousands - even tens of thousands - of people. Healthcare is adapting to new ways of working - Integrated Care Systems, hospital chains and services shared across NHS trusts. Alongside this, healthcare professionals are taking on more flexible ways of working - with individual roles that span multiple organisations, portfolio careers or the clinical gig economy (bank, agency and locum shifts).

There’s a huge amount going on, and without a structured approach individuals can end up feeling like very small cogs in a very big machine. Keeping on track with your professional development and developing the skills you need can easily get lost amongst all this noise.

BEST Solution

How Compassly helps

Your personal competency passport

Compassly has been designed around the needs of individual healthcare professionals from the start. You don’t get given a login by your employer. Instead, individuals create their own, personal account first – this allows them to keep a record of their skills and professional development in their own Competency Passport – your own record, irrespective of where you work.

Competencies can be maintained across employing organisations, further contributed to and develop as you build your skills and progress your career.

Quick and easy to join, learn and use

The model of how healthcare works has changed. Getting setup on all the IT systems sadly hasn’t. Joining a new organisation shouldn’t be a chore – or if you’re working a temporary shift, it shouldn’t be a barrier to you being able to use the systems you need.

With Compassly you can be added to an organisation and setup in a role in under a minute, approved directly by your manager.

Upload your existing work

While going digital helps avoid future paperwork, it doesn’t always have the answer for the forms, certificates and other documents you already have. Compassly lets you upload these as evidence against competencies and professional development, so that the evidence can sit alongside new digital competency records as you develop them.

User Friendly

We truly care about making things as quick and easy for our users, and we think it shows. Even down to shaving seconds off the time it takes you to login. It makes business sense for organisations, freeing up staff time to focus on care and eliminating the downtime spent on learning a new system (you won’t need to find time to attend a training course on Compassly). But for us it also reflects the trust users put in us, and we honour that by doing everything we can to make the experience quicker and easier for them.

On your device if you want it

Compassly is publicly available on the App Store and Google Play. So you can keep it live and ready in your pocket, accessible whenever you need. No need to find a login to a desktop computer. We know that you value the space on your phone, so we work hard to keep Compassly as small as possible (tens of Mb, or the size of just a few songs or pictures). And we know your data can be important too, so we keep data transmission as lightweight as possible too – you should barely notice it.

On the web if you don’t

Compassly is publicly available on the App Store and Google Play. So you can keep it live and ready in your pocket, accessible whenever you need. No need to find a login to a desktop computer. We know that you value the space on your phone, so we work hard to keep Compassly as small as possible (tens of Mb, or the size of just a few songs or pictures). And we know your data can be important too, so we keep data transmission as lightweight as possible too – you should barely notice it.

Contact Us

If you’d like to be involved in how we design, test and build these exciting new parts of Compassly, please contact us to find out more – we believe the best way to build fantastic products is to work alongside our users from the very start.