Wadhwani Foundation (WF), in collaboration with Narayana Health (NH), today announced the success of its skills training pilot program for NH’s healthcare support staff. The program aims to fill the void of critical skills needed in the healthcare industry that are currently missing from formal and informal nursing education programs. Using videos and interactive, technology-based lessons, accessible on an online platform, WF’s courseware is designed for rapid rollout. To date, WF has reached more than 1,000 nurses and nursing assistants across 20 Narayana Health centers in just six months. This program is part of Wadhwani Foundation’s larger vision of skilling India by leveraging technology and transformative learning techniques.
India continues to face a growing gap in maintaining a skilled labor force, or knowledge workers, to conduct some of the nation’s most critical – though often overlooked – jobs. Support and paramedical staff represent this segment in the healthcare industry; individuals are required to perform a skilled job without access to a job competency driven curriculum or having undergone formal training. According to industry experts, India’s health care sector faces a shortage of 1M nursing assistants. WF strives to meet this need by producing quality, open source training solutions.
“Our strategic collaboration with Wadhwani Foundation is a step in the right direction. India’s healthcare industry is facing an acute shortage of support staff and I am glad that the skill development initiative of Wadhwani Foundation has already skilled over 1,000 competent staff. This 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 realize this goal without diluting the skills of our people or quality of our care,” said Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, Chairman, Narayana Health.
WF worked closely with practitioners at Narayana Health to identify critical nursing and patient care skills, job needs, required training processes, as well as curriculum and generic content. Wadhwani Foundation’s instructional design team restructured course content to leverage experiential, peer-driven, interactive, and learner-centric pedagogies. By using videos, games, simulations, and group activities to deliver content, WF’s approach ensures that students receive a 360 degree learning experience. All courses are deployed using an
easily accessible online technology platform, reducing the dependence on and workload of teachers, while providing flexibility for students to study at their own pace and location.
The carefully designed job competency curriculum includes typical medical procedures, as well as functional English, Life & Workplace skills, Basic IT skills, Occupational Safety, Health & Environment training, and Medical Math. More than 160 hours of content has been developed since early 2013 and the curriculum continues to be piloted for skill upgradation with new nurses, patient care assistants, and other new and existing healthcare support staff. Feedback from students has been uniformly positive with every single student preferring it to traditional classes.
Elaborating further on the successful partnership with Narayana Health, Ajay Kela, Wadhwani Foundation’s CEO, said, “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 that will be available to the Industry. This pilot is part of the Foundation’s larger vision to develop a market ready skilled force across industries through our innovative and scalable technology solution. Our partnership with Narayana Health is a positive first step in that direction.”
Narayana Health is mainstreaming Wadhwani Foundation’s initiative as part of its comprehensive professional development plan for all employees. 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. WF is also 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). The stage is set for a revolution in job driven education.
About Wadhwani Foundation
The Wadhwani Foundation was founded in 2003 by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, a U.S. based philanthropist with passion towards economic growth. Dr. Wadhwani envisioned large-scale, high-impact social change through economic acceleration as the primary mission of the Foundation by leveraging India’s growing human potential. It is this passion which led to the formation of the Foundation’s first Entrepreneurship Initiative in 2003. Subsequently Dr. Wadhwani and his committed colleagues have fine-tuned the theory of driving social impact through economic acceleration and the Foundation has expanded into U.S. and emerging economies with plans to combine best-in-class workforce development programs and educational technology.
The Foundation drives job creation and skill development in India through the following five Initiatives:
· NEN – The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) inspires, educates and supports first generation entrepreneurs to create millions of job. In FY2013, NEN entrepreneurs started over 700 companies. Over 500 institutes work with NEN to educate and inspire over 500,000 students every year. On an average 100,000 students join the Wadhwani Foundation Entrepreneur Cell on campus every year. Thousands of inspiring and practicing entrepreneurs are supported through NEN’s Video Academy and a wide network of trained mentors
· SDN – Through Skill Development Network (SDN), the Foundation aims to revolutionize skill development by leveraging technology to create millions of highly-skilled knowledge workers, globally. SDN trained 5000 high school students in Haryana and it has plans to scale to 40,000 students across multiple states, this year. SDN also worked closely with Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in India to establish the National framework for vocational education which lead to a MHRD funded pilot of 200 Community Colleges in FY2014. To scale skill development through technology, SDN initiated the “Race to a Job” program in India which works closely with Industry to transform their job training programs into a learner centric multi-media online curriculum that is deployed back within the Industry and also publicly available
· OND – Opportunity Network for Disabled (OND) aims to mainstream the educated disabled into sustainable high-quality corporate jobs by making corporates recognize the business value of hiring the disabled. The Foundation has already trained and placed 5000 PwD in corporate jobs and over 100 corporates & 500 HR and business managers have been sensitized. Several Government organizations, corporate and private Trainers have been mobilized to recruit & train PwDs to achieve the set goal of mainstreaming 100,000 disabled in 5 years
· RIN – The Foundation’s Research and Innovation Network (RIN) aims to propel India towards leadership in innovation by encouraging and enabling world-class research coupled with industry/company creation. The Foundation initiated the Wadhwani Center for Biosciences and Biotechnology at IIT Bombay in 2009 and established the Shanta Wadhwani Research Center at Cardiac and Neural diseases at the National Center for Biosciences, Bangalore in 2012. Across both these centers, over 40 investigators and over 150 PhD and post-doctorate scholars have been engaged in targeted cancer, low cost biosensors and cardiac & neural research
· India-US Policy: The Wadhwani Foundation has established parallel Policy Chairs in India and the US with the goal of strengthening and expanding India-US economic relations. The Chairs are set up at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington DC and at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi. In addition, an in-house Policy team drives research based policy actions in collaboration with Central and State Governments in the area of economic development
