The Challenge

BC Children’s Hospital Specialty Nursing Programs deliver essential on-the-job learning for newly qualified nurses. They had seen curriculum and learning platform work we had provided for other services and were interested in how we could support the overhaul of their programs.

Having worked with teams across the BC Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) for years, we understood the deeper context  and tested some of these presumptions during our discovery with the team based on our Learning Focus Framework. This provided an opportunity to reimagine how learning could better support nurses, their mentors, educators and leadership.

Our discovery mapped the following challenges (heavily summarized!) for support learning program nurses, their mentors, educators and leadership across our Learning Focus Framework:

Affective Focus: the learner’s experience
New nurses, just starting highly demanding roles, often felt overwhelmed by demands of in-service learning. Multiple courses, scattered resources, and separate channels for assessments and mentor contact made it hard to stay motivated or see progress. Without a clear, unified view of their development, confidence and engagement quickly eroded.

 

Organizational Focus: mission and requirements

BC resources were not structured as a dedicated learning space. Tracking, competency framework self-assessments, mentor direction and feedback, and reference materials existed in separate systems, many of which were outdated. This patchwork lacked consistency and could make learning processes inefficient and confusing.

 


Connective Focus: group learning, interaction and feedback
Professional growth depended on interaction, yet nurses lacked an integrated place to connect with peers and mentors. Without shared discussion or a central progress view, support needs went unnoticed. The disconnection between mentor input and learning plans weakened both collaboration and accountability.

 

Resource Focus: learning resources and delivery
Learning tools and resources were fragmented and rarely aligned to learning goals. Without cohesive, updated, and easily accessible materials, nurses spent time navigating systems instead of building skills. This undermined collective learning and left professional development feeling disjointed.

The Learnbase Approach

The solution was an enhanced adaptation of functionality and concepts, architecture, course design concepts  and experience that we had deployed for other health-related organizations and services like Compass Mental Health, CADDRA, BCMHSUS and BC Children’s Hospital Health Literacy initiatives. We were able to draw from best practice as well as any pitfalls of previous approaches. This focused on using and customizing elements from our core vision of creating the maximum impact with the least navigational burden – eliminating the noise and overwhelm of the previous LMS.

We greatly expanded our existing functionality base and expertise to develop solutions for multiple concurrent programs, with a strong emphasis on internal training, group leader tools, and one-on-one mentor guidance and a robust and advanced advanced role permissions so that many different groups and cohorts can see very specific sets of competencies and resource collections.

A Learning organizer where different groups of learners can find carefully curated learning pathways, competencies, plans and favourites as well as badges, certificates, and digests of their learning notes and summaries.

Collections of tile-based learning bursts that the individual leaner can organize, comment on and add into plans and favorites

Competency tracking: self assessment based tracking against standardized guidelines that can be submitted to mentors and tracked by department leaders

Individual plans allowing direct communication with group mentors through chat embedded directly in plan items and group management so mentors can manage, support and track their cohorts

Visually and methodologically cohesive redesigned curriculum

The Outcome

The result is a unified and cohesively branded learning space that is now being further envisioned and adapted to serve both BC Children’s and BC Women’s Hospitals to bring together all nurse, clinician, and allied health programs into a single, inclusive and intuitive Centre for Learning.

For nurses, the benefits are immediate. When the site launched for the first cohort of new nurses, we were amazed by the rapid progress made, even on the first day. There’s a clear path through training, easier access to key resources, tools for reflection and tracking progress, and built-in support for mentoring. All of it lives in one place. For the organization, it’s a platform that’s ready to grow, designed to flex, and adapt to the ongoing growing visions of multiple health programs.