Wadhwani Foundation, in collaboration with Narayana Health (NH) embarked on a skills training pilot programme and is now working to expand its reach to provide healthcare sector with industry-ready personnel.

The curriculum includes typical medical procedures, along with functional English, life & workplace skills, basic IT skills, occupational safety, health & environment training, and medical math. Over  210 hours of content is developed since early 2013. Feedback from students has been positive.

Narayana Health is mainstreaming Wadhwani Foundation’s initiative as part of its comprehensive professional development plan for all employees.

The Foundation completed  training for 1,700 nurses and nursing assistants across 20 centres Narayana Health Group facilities. The program is designed to  fill the void of critical skills needs in the healthcare industry that are currently missing from formal and informal nursing education programmes.

According to industry experts, India’s health care sector faces a shortage of one million nursing assistants.

“Our strategic collaboration with Wadhwani Foundation is a step in the right direction. It  happened despite full shift schedules, because these learner-centric e- modules do not drain experienced teaching nurses’ time and allow the trainees flexibility in taking courses inside and outside the classroom. Since we seek to expand from 5,000 beds to 30,000 beds in three years, rather than running disparate and traditional teacher driven training courses, this approach of creating and deploying repeatable, modular self and peer- driven lessons can help us realise this goal without diluting the skills of our people or quality of our care,” said Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman, Narayana Health.

Wadhwani Foundation worked closely with practitioners at Narayana Health to identify critical nursing and patient care skills, job needs, required training processes, to devise the  curriculum content.

Job  outcomes should be the main criteria by which we evaluate skill training and the best way to develop such courses is to work hand in glove with the employers. In partnership with Narayana Health, one of India’s largest healthcare service providers, we have successfully created a technology-enabled curriculum for comprehensive training of healthcare workers , Ajay Kela, chief executive officer, Wadhwani Foundation.

Wadhwani Foundation has begun to roll out its healthcare curriculum to other healthcare providers. The roadmap also includes deployment of NH internal training in feeder and community colleges / and other training providers. It is in discussions with AICTE and the Healthcare Sector Skills Council to make the courseware a part of the national school and college curriculum through the National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF).