A number of workshops took place over the central band of the UK last week. In addition to the Universities who attended, the workshops also prompted other Universities who were unable to attend to organise individual meetings. The company has therefore a busy schedule of meetings arranged for the New Year.

An additional workshop will also be held on Monday 23^rd January 2017 between 1.00 p.m. and 3.30 p.m. at the Executive Suite, Oxford Brookes University. Lunch will be provided, the event is FREE and there are no restrictions on the numbers attending from each University.

Universities who attended the workshops last week fed back that they found it useful to discuss the key issues involved in transitioning from paper to electronic portfolios and discovering the way these had been addressed at Southampton; Bournemouth and Surrey Universities. All these sites have now moved from a pilot to a full implementation and there are now over 11,500 active users at Southampton University.

The focus of the sessions was and will be on;

• Enhancing the user experience
• Accessing the sites
• Institutional Benefits
• Project Implementation

It was apparent that a number of Universities consider that revalidation provides an ideal opportunity to make this transition from paper to electronic portfolios.

If you want to book a place(s) at the workshop or arrange an individual meeting please contact our Customer Services Director Chris Peat by email chris@axia.email or phone him on 07771 996620.

The article that appeared in the Nursing Times provides clear guidance on how to fully digitise the assessment of professional practice across a whole Health Sciences faculty. All students on the nursing, midwifery and allied health professional courses at the University of Southampton now use an e-Assessment of Professional Practice (eAoPP) tool.

If you want to know how they did it there is no better way to find out than to read the article appeared in the Nursing Times in 2015 and was written by the Project Managers, Pauline Morgan and Chloe Dyer.

The article shows that some of the potential barriers to adoption of such a system like access to computers and the internet were over stated. The site has been introduced without any need to supply computers or other devices.

The authors summarised the key success factors as follows;

• Stakeholders involvement
• Starting small and phased roll out
• Involvement of trust practice educators
• Student /staff education and dissemination
• Building capacity
• Just-in-time support
• Responding to feedback
• Collaborative working with contractor

The full article is available here.

The NET conference draws together nurses from across the world and we are delighted to again be exhibiting at the event.

We have had the opportunity to speak to delegates from Universities in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK and it is apparent there is a growing interest in the online assessment of professional practice. It is therefore great that we have been able to talk about the successful introduction of our online system at the Universities of Southampton, Bournemouth and Surrey. Delegates have been impressed by the way we have managed to reflect the particular approach to practice assessment at each University.

A number of the delegates have discussed their concerns with respect to an online system. They have expressed concerns about signatures and they have been reassured that every decision in the portfolio is date stamped and linked back to a specific user name and password, arguably making it more secure than paper. Some delegates have wondered about whether they will need to supply their students with devices and have pleased to hear that this was not required at any of the Universities we work with. Others have wondered about the challenges of Hospital firewalls and pleased to hear that this has always been overcome.