The right learning subscription offers flexibility, simplifies administration and ensures that community health workers (CHWs) have the resources they need to deliver and coordinate high-quality care to their communities.
This approach offers a successful strategy for training and upskilling your CHW workforce. Many individuals want to promote health and foster community capacity for health equity. However, they lack skills. Opting for in-person trainers to cover all the material in one go might not always be the most effective approach. This becomes particularly problematic when time is of the essence and you require prompt training for your team.
You need efficiency in your training process so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time with every CHW training. A ready-to-go learning process is important because traditional classroom training takes time and extra funding.
Here, you’ll learn some of the benefits of a learning subscription for CHWs and the people who work with them, so you can share this streamlined approach to training with other stakeholders at your agency.
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What is an Online Learning Subscription?
A learning subscription lets you begin training within a few days. It’s a digital learning solution that provides 24/7 access to a complete catalog of interactive training courses and videos for anyone on your team who needs to build skills or meet training requirements. Learning subscriptions are helpful for existing and new hires. They they make it easy to stay current because health recommendations are constantly changed and revised. Access to a continuous learning system like CHWTraining keeps staff connected to enhanced training or CHW certification requirements with each new update.
Ultimately, the quicker your organization can hire and train CHWs, the faster they can do the tasks they’re are so good at. This includes providing high-impact prevention, early intervention for at-risk individuals, navigation support, and linkage to care. Uncoordinated training efforts can put your health outreach projects at stake.
Take a look at these 7 benefits of a learning subscription for training CHWs.
1. Accessible 24/7, Year-Round
Most learning subscriptions, including CHWTraining, provide year-round access, 24 hours per day. This means that your staff can access training when it’s convenient for them: between site visits or client calls or on weekends. Moreover, a learning subscription allows you to train new hires within a 12-month period or longer, depending on the duration of your subscription.
2. Streamlined Administration
Grant-funded CHW programs often require meticulous documentation of course completion and certificates received. Outsourcing the training program simplifies the administrative process. Spending for grant requirements is clearly documented, and the need for expense reimbursements is greatly reduced.
3. Meeting Competency Requirements
Many states follow CHW core competency requirements, such as those from the Community Health Worker Core Consensus Project (C3), and your team members might be required to meet them for employment. A CHW learning subscription tracks the common requirements nationally so you don’t have to.
4. Dedicated Technical Support
Most of the organizations we work with realize their training needs but lack the staff to do it. Many programs run on a slim team—sometimes of just one or two people. If they’re in charge of their regular job duties, the last thing they have the time or skills to do is support participants who need technical support. Having a technical support team means you can have support people who speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and other languages. This allows in-house administrators to focus on their primary duties without compromising support for trainees.
5. Continuous Curriculum Updates
Health recommendations, as well as health and social service systems, grant objectives and population health concerns, undergo continuous changes. It is important for CHW teams to stay informed about these updates as they occur. Training subscriptions let CHWs gain access to timely updates throughout the year, ensuring they remain up to date with the latest information. To reinforce their knowledge, you can implement periodic training refreshers, which foster ongoing competence among your staff.
6. Cost-Efficiency
Many training programs, such as sexual harassment or assessment skills, don’t vary much from year to year or from class to class. Transitioning to online training eliminates the need to repeat the same sessions for significant cost savings. Moving training online means getting away from repeating the same training year after year and to each employee group.
7. Simplified Reporting
Reports that are generated on the fly can help create a personal experience and give administrators an easy view of how staff are doing. Tracking progress is as easy as clicking a button, which lets you quickly identify a learner’s status and gain insight into their training journey.
These are just some of the many ways that a CHW learning subscription can greatly improve the quality of your workforce and training efforts.
Curious about how you can bring more efficiency into your community health worker training program? Contact CHWTraining to talk about your needs today.
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