AXIA digital

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Skills Passports – Creating a Transferable Workforce

At Axia Digital we are very proud of the work we have done to develop digital passports and this is a continuing area of growth for our company. Skills passports allow staff to demonstrate their core skills effectively and easily against a standardised framework and share this information quickly with fellow professionals and line managers, across their organisation. This enables staff to move across locations without the need for lengthy skills checking and assessment procedures, saving time and money for employers and organisations.

Please read our case study Skills Passports – Creating a Transferable Workforce

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Axia Digital wins prestigious Irish Education Award


 

Axia Digital’s work in Ireland – in collaboration with the Department of Nursing, Atlantic Technological University, Donegal – was recognised last night (April 27th 2023) at the prestigious Irish National Education Awards in Dublin. These awards recognise excellence in the third level education sector in on Ireland from both State and privately-funded institutions.

The Department of Nursing ATU Donegal, HSE and Axia Digital (Ireland) received the Best Industry/Business-Academic Collaboration Award for implementing the first digital version of the National Competency Assessment Document for Nurses.

This collaboration has brought together academic and industry partners to develop a cutting-edge nursing education programme. The collaboration leverages the strengths of each partner to create a web-based version of the assessment document that is accessed by the students and their practice-based Preceptors, who assess their work, and the Community Practice Co-ordinators who support the nurses when they are on placement. The assessment document can also be accessed remotely by tutors and the other University staff responsible for quality assuring the assessment process.

One of the remarkable features of this project was that whilst everyone accepts the direction of travel is towards digital because ‘it is the way to go’ – the practicalities, both real and imagined, represented challenges that hitherto have prevented such an approach being adopted. The project also began at a time when the cyber-attack at the HSE had ‘rocked’ the belief of health professionals in the safety of digital systems, and when the Covid pandemic was still leading to significant pressures on Hospitals and community health teams. The geography of the project area was also, on the face of it, potentially unhelpful. The site was not being accessed from a major city like Dublin but rather from smaller hospitals and community settings across Donegal.

Dr Louise McBride, Head of Nursing and Healthcare at ATU, commented: ‘The MyCad Eportfolio project collaboration brings together academic, industry and our HSE clinical nursing partners to develop a cutting-edge online access dashboard for nursing students and staff for a competence assessment Eportfolio in our nursing education programmes. We’re delighted to see our efforts being acknowledged and these nominations are a testament of collaboration, commitment and success of ATU with HSE North West Nursing and Axia Digital.”

Chris Peat, Chair, Axia Digital (Ireland)  – who with Max Jordan, the company’s Senior Developer with Specialism (Assessment Systems) – led the team who implemented the site added:

‘Our technology platform has been developed over 20 years and it enables us to transform paper based assessment processes into digital ones. This transformation brings many benefits and crucially enables health professionals to focus on what matters, which is the practice development and assessment of nurses by streamlining the administration of the process. We’re delighted to have collaborated with ATU Donegal so that it has become the first University in Ireland where nurses are using an assessment document that they can access from their mobile phone.’

An online dissemination event to present the site and provide an opportunity to talk to some of its users takes place on Thursday 11th May between 11.00 and 13.00. Please book your place by emailing events@axiadigitalireland.com .

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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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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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Partnership working at the NET conference 2018

Axia Digital is again sponsoring the annual NET networking for education and health care conference being held at Churchill College, Cambridge.

The conference is the first one to take place since the launch of the new Nursing standards and there are several presentations highlighting the work of the pan area groups, which are now developing regional practice assessment documents across the country.

Creating pan area assessment documents based on the pan London document now appears to be a given. Indeed, there is momentum to create a national document. Several partnerships are also planning to have a digital version of the new assessment document(s) when they are finalised.

The session on ‘Partnership Working’ at the conference demonstrated how much progress had been made with pan area projects. It is a major step forward that nurse practitioner and academics are taking control of the process of introducing the new standards rather than having the process dictated to them.

It also highlighted some of the opportunities that would be presented by having a comprehensive data set of assessment practice, that would be easier to access and review because it was online. There was a commitment at the workshop to not only replicate the paper document but to explore innovative approaches to assessment.

Some of the challenges were also acknowledged. Various presenters made a plea to ensure that there was a consistency with respect to the roles of those involved in assessment. In our experience this is particularly necessary for academic staff, who are often caught between the demands on them from their host Universities and their students/mentors. Digital assessment potentially provides an answer because it does reduce the time checking portfolios, as well as enabling those portfolios to be accessed throughout the year. However, those benefits are only delivered if there is clarity about the role of what is to be called the academic advisor.

Chris Peat our Customer Services Director who is attending the conference comments,

‘It is great to hear how partnerships are being established across the UK. We welcome these developments and we are here to let Universities know that we can support whatever approach to digital assessment that they decide to adopt, whether it be as individual university, as part of an area-based pan assessment group or a mixture of both.’

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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