NextStep's National COVID-Ready Caregiver Certification was developed in response to the lack of educational content supporting professional and non-professional caregivers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2020, we were watching as an outbreak of COVID-19 swept through a local long-term care facility in Seattle claiming 37 lives. Poor access to training, strenuous staffing ratios, and lack of essential PPE was leading to dangerous levels of transmission in long-term care facilities (LTC). CNAs were getting sick, and they were scared of bringing this new virus home to their families. NextStep recognized the immediate need for transparent, readily accessible, and updatable training. A decision was made to develop and launch a free COVID-19 preparedness course for professional and family caregivers. In partnership with Leading Age and the National Domestic Worker's Alliance the National COVID-Ready Caregiver Certification was launched. Over the next 16 months over 32k students signed up for the course at a completion & certification rate of 75%.
As NextStep's design director, I needed to ensure the primary CNA certification course continued to support the needs of our learners while we developed a second universally accessible COVID specific course. I met with the founders of NextStep to plan how we could accomplish this task. No engineering resources were available to build the course, it needed to integrate existing skills with newly developed lessons, and it needed to be complete in 3 weeks. It was my responsibility to develop the learner user experience, design all graphic assets, and build the course in a no-code platform.
"Easily accessible and reliable information in the fight against coronavirus is crucial to ensuring the safety and well-being of staff and the older adults they serve. This program is a timely and welcome resource for caregivers."
Caregivers run the gamut from folks employed by huge national firms with massive training budgets, to independent individuals caring for a friend or family member. Caregivers were desperate to know how to protect themselves, their patients, and their families.
In the early days of the pandemic no one yet knew how the virus was transmitted, and we all were looking to learn from someone we could trust.
It was vital for us to find with folks with not only a high level of expertise, but who also engendered trust, to teach our course. We partnered with Dr. Vin Gupta, MD, MPA, a critical care pulmonologist, and health policy expert to explain what was known about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease called COVID-19, Melissa Mills, NextStep's Director of Lab and Clinical Ops, provided the direct patient care perspective, and address the strain on caregiver mental health we were able to have Lynn Morrison, MA, CHT provide guidance on coping in times of general and acute stress.
While the lesson videos were being produced, I began to build out the course delivery platform. I leveraged a third party LMS platform to host the individual lessons, built custom landing pages, integrated a group access module, and worked with our customer success manager to develop a compliance tracker for employer orgs.
Initially all course content would be available free, but the founders wanted the option for paid access, so I also developed a checkout workflow as well.
The main landing page for the course funneled our two audiences to the right paths. Individuals could log in or sign up for the course and employers were able to obtain seats for their staff. All were able to preview the course and see the sponsoring partners.
Over 20k folks signed up for the course within the first month of launching.
This course mixed content created previously with recordings done over zoom, leading to significant variability in quality. This was spun into a positive experience to emphasize NextStep took social distancing seriously with a unobtrusive call out on all new videos produced.
Many professional caregivers need to complete a number of continuing education units (CEUs) to keep their licenses active. An important part of making the National COVID-Ready Caregiver Certification was to get it accepted as valid CEUs. This would enable more employers to assign it to their employees, increasing it's availability and utilization.
Overtime, folks who completed the COVID-Ready certification course started sending in words of encouragement to their fellow caregivers. I built a showcase for those messages on our log in page for folks to return to if needed.
After the successful launch of the National COVID-Ready Caregiver Certification course, the team identified another opportunity. Under the federal emergency order due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid waved many of the training requirements placed on CNAs before they can provide direct patient care. These new workers would be classified as "Temporary Nurse Aides" and there was only one 8 hour flash animation training.
We decided as a team that we could provide a more comprehensive and engaging course by combining the newly build National COVID-Ready Caregiver Certification course with additional essential CNA skills to give confidence to these brave folks who would be joining the healthcare workforce in the midst of this devastating global pandemic.
In all we certified 856 new Temporary Nurse Aides working in facilities across the country.
