AXIA digital

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Helping our customers meet the challenges posed by Covid 19

A significant proportion of the company’s business is in the health sector and therefore it will be not be a surprise that we have actively been supporting many of our customers meet the challenges presented by Covid 19.

The configurability of our software has meant we have been able to make rapid changes to our sites even for some of our newest customers.

Last year Health Education England selected the company to create an e-portfolio for Dentists involved on post qualification training programmes across England and Wales. The site is now built and been well received, prior to being used in earnest by trainees from September.

However due to Covid 19 the training programmes of last year’s graduates have been disrupted because of the closure of Dental practices and the programme for the new graduates has had to been altered to reflect the fact that they will also have reduced access to practice.

The Axia Digital team has had to work rapidly both to adapt the existing practice assessments and to provide additional assessments for this year’s student. All this has been achieved on time whilst still retaining all the features of the existing programme, for when full access to practice becomes available.

The development of the e-portfolio for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society also posed a similar challenge. The RPS working in conjunction with Health Education England, had to quickly to adapt their Foundation programme to create a Provisional Foundation Programme which reflects the challenges faced by new Pharmacists, entering a highly demanding working environment.

Working closely with the team at the RPS the portfolio to support the programme was developed in five weeks and has already been soft launched. The team is now moving on to expand the e-portfolio so that it can be used by Pharmacists working at Consultant Practice level.

Alongside this work we have made quick changes to many of the Practice Assessment portfolios we provide to Nursing courses in response to the changing patterns of placements as a result of the demands on hospitals due to Covid 19.

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The European Centre of Excellence for Research in Continuing Professional Development

The European Centre of Excellence for Research in Continuing Professional Development was launched in Dublin today.

Axia Digital are delighted to have been a member of the steering committee that has laid the groundwork for today’s launch. The creation of the Centre of Excellence is the initiative of Professor Thomas Kearns, the Executive Director of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. He is also board member of Axia Digital (Ireland).

Today’s launch was attended by academics; practitioners and employer organisations from almost all countries in the European Union and from the USA; Rumania and Albania. Many of the attendees were also there as representatives of European networks for nurses, midwives and other allied Health professionals. The Centre is therefore ideally placed to secure European funding to support its research and pilot projects.

The Centre is based at the RCSI’s Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery and this evening those involved in the launch will be attending the Conference Dinner, which precedes the 39th Annual International Nursing & Midwifery Research and Education conference. One of the guests will be our Customer Services Director Chris Peat who comments;

‘It is a great honour to have been involved in the creation of this important Centre and to continue to be involved over the coming years. It is generally recognised that there is insufficient evidence about CPD and its impact on patient care. We look forward to supporting the Centre, by helping to identify the impact that CPD can have and the role that digital tools can play.’

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Reflections on our history; not just a technology company

Our preparations for our forthcoming ISO 9001 and 27001 inspections have prompted a purge of all the documents we have accumulated over the past 20 years, in part to create space for paper-free desks. You would have thought that as a company committed to electronic systems that we would have already been on top of this, but we are an IT case of ‘physician heal thyself’!

As the primary guilty party for this, I have been the one clearing out the company papers. It has reminded me of all the work we have done. It’s easy to forget some of it. Not because it was work we would rather not be associated with, there is very little of that, more because we have moved on. What though jumps out is how those ‘long forgotten’ projects have added to our collective corporate intelligence, that we continue to offer to all our present projects.

In our early days, we developed not only online guidance tools to help adults with their career choices but numerous other online diagnostic and planning tools. Dealing with the new challenge of customising these online assessments for specific regions of Italy, prompted us to develop the ability to easily customise content for specific groups. Our work with numerous training providers delivering NVQs and now apprenticeships, helped us to understand and develop complex hierarchies of roles for the assessment of skills. Assisting an area-based organisation to track the impact of guidance interviews, taught us how to manage data across multiple and different databases.

    

There are several attempts to produce strategy papers to describe our offer although it is also apparent that various new markets are opened by unexpected opportunities. Developing a site for nurse prescribers at a University, ultimately led to our supporting the practice assessment of all students on health-based courses. Through it all through our commitment to understanding our customer’s needs and creating sites that meet their requirements is apparent.

We can only do what we have done because of our technology and the bank transfers to colleagues in Canada, serve as a reminder that the Axia in our company name, derives from our previous owner Axia NetMedia corporation who were responsible for the operation of the Alberta SuperNet. Still having colleagues in Canada and the UK who are used to managing big data has supported our work on sites with big data sets; we now have one with over 800k users.

Today, I am on my way to a discussion about the equivalence route for the Academy for Advance Practice. The technology piece is almost complete. However, the core part of the discussion will be about records of evidence, how much? how do we evidence validity? It will echo the one I had last week with nurses at the Simon community in Dublin, which was about what and how do I capture my professional development in an environment full of new and daily challenges, many of which require new development and learning.

Different contexts but essentially the same sort of discussion we have been involved in throughout our history. The solution as always is a combination of the application of sound principles of assessment and making the best use of technology, to provide an intuitive as possible pathway through that assessment journey.

At the meeting, I will be endeavouring to contribute our technology and our collective experience and knowledge developed over 20 years.

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The CapitalNurse Digital Career Framework tool was launched on January 17th 2018

 

The CapitalNurse DigitalCareer Framework tool was launched on January 17th 2018 at a prestigious event at Connaught Hotel. It has been a great project to work on because it makes full use of Axia Digital’s knowledge and expertise.

The CapitalNurse Digital Career Framework is a free-to-use digital career tool for all nurses, designed to advance a London-wide approach to career progression.  It enables nurses to reflect on their practice, receive and review feedback from peers and service users and have a structured career conversation with a facilitator.

We are delighted to have been able to work on this project because we can offer our longstanding involvement in Career Development; our intimate understanding of the nursing profession and our ability to apply the latest technology to create a highly sophisticated but easy to use tool.

One of the first major projects the company developed was Learndirect Futures which helped Adults discover their skills and interests and use this information to identify career options for them. It also included a full range of tools that were designed to help individuals develop their careers. Our involvement with the Careers development has continued and we supply the online national Register of Careers Professionals.

Nursing, Midwifery and other Allied Health Professionals have always been at the heart of this company’s work. One of our first sites was the Learning Zone for the Royal College of Nursing and we now support members of Health professional bodies capture evidence of their Continuous Professional Development in the UK, Ireland and internationally. We have also converted the paper assessment documents for Undergraduate programmes at several Universities into a digital format.In terms of the technology that supports this CapitalNurse Digital Career Framework tool the company has recently been exploring the innovative ways that 360 feedback tools can be used to support Career Progression.

Chris Peat, Customer Services Director comments that ,

‘It is great to have been able to work on a project that flows from so much from the work we have been engaged in since the company’s formation over twenty years ago. We also welcome the fact that we have had the chance to work with the Capital Nurse Project which is involved in so much innovative work to support nurses in London.’

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Discover our offer to professional bodies

Are you a professional body that wants to increase the range of services you offer to your members? Do you want to move some of the services you offer online but are concerned about cost?

Continuous Professional Development is changing. Gone are the days when just counting CPD activities was enough, what matters now is that individuals are able to demonstrate a commitment to their development and evidence the impact CPD has had on their practice. Capturing that impact on paper is difficult. An e-portfolio makes it easier through providing greater inter activity.

We have a worked with a full range of professional bodies of all sizes in the UK and internationally, from ones with less than 250 members to others with more than half a million students,  to enable them to provide their members with a range of tools to help them plan and capture their CPD

Just some of the tools we have developed include;

  • Planned Pathways on key topics to help members plan their CPD
  • Pushing a record of a CPD event that a member attends, into their CPD record
  • Inviting others to verify professional records and CPD activity
  • Managing applications for accreditation from the professional body online
  • Creating multiple reports from one CPD record.

Our distinctive offer is that we are able use these tools to handcraft each site to meet the specific needs of our partner professional bodies.

If you want to find out more we are holding a series of one hour online interactive workshops in which we will present our work and you will have an opportunity to ask questions.

The workshops will take place on;

  • Monday 20th March at 11.00 a.m.
  • Wednesday 29th March at 9.00 a.m.
  • Friday 4th April at 11.00 a.m.

If you want to book a place please complete the form below.


 

Our unique offer lies in our ability to deliver to our customers exactly what they require. We do not have products but instead a platform which we can use to mirror our customer processes. None of our customers need to change what they do to fit into our system, our system is flexible enough to reflect what they currently do and enhance the user’s experience.

Since 1997 AXIA Digital has been helping organisations capture and assess skills and competencies that are demonstrated in a professional setting or in the workplace. We create leading edge digital solutions, which mirror and then enhance existing assessment systems. Our solutions are all individually hand crafted but are deployed on the same platform.

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