Founded in 1973 in Las Vegas, Nevada, WestCare is dedicated to providing person-centered, trauma-informed care to adults, Veterans, and families. In the decades since their founding, they have grown to serve the behavioral health needs of communities across 20 states.
This growth has allowed them to help hundreds of people across the country but has presented administrative challenges for their staff. From finding a centralized training program to ensuring staff in different states meet variable compliance requirements, WestCare needed a platform that could streamline multiple branches of their operation. In 2024, they partnered with Relias to do just that.
“It’s allowed us to really put trainings out there that weren’t always getting done before and people were constantly saying, ‘We need training on this.’”
– Jennifer Hilton, Director of Technology and Training, WestCare
Improving training processes
Prior to partnering with Relias, WestCare tried different learning management systems. While these systems offered the curricula needed for some staff, they were not able to offer the full breadth of content WestCare’s nationwide providers require to learn new skills, receive accreditations, and remain compliant.
When it came time to make a change, WestCare decided to partner with Relias because of the depth and breadth of content within our learning libraries.
“We have so many different areas that we service. So, having access to the libraries and being able to add in libraries and work with different pieces so that we could have all the training available that we needed for the various positions and types of services that we offer is fantastic. And I just couldn’t find that in any other provider,” said Jennifer Hilton, Director of Training and Technology at WestCare.
Not only has the quality of Relias’ learning content made a positive impact on WestCare’s ability to provide quality training, our platform has also made it easier for their administrators to assign and track training. The Relias Platform offers one, centralized location where administrators can assign training based on job role or function and check which staff members have completed this training.
Streamlining compliance
With facilities across 20 states, ensuring their staff remained compliant proved difficult for WestCare before partnering with Relias. Since implementing the Relias Platform, however, WestCare has been able to set a single, nationwide standard for all its staff which fulfills these various compliance requirements.
“For all of our regions, we work towards CARF standards,” explained Hilton. “We work to make sure that each entity can be certified in CARF depending on the services that they’re providing, whether it be workforce development, child welfare, or behavioral health training.”
The quality of training content on the Relias Platform has allowed Hilton and her team to easily and effectively create training plans that meet standards for CARF and other accreditation and compliance bodies. And the ability of staff to take the required trainings in the same platform makes it easy to know when facilities are in or out of compliance.
“Because we have so many regulatory bodies, we have a standard for compliance for our staff to complete trainings,” Hilton said. “And we can measure more than if they’re just completing training. We also look at if they’re completing it on time, completing it within the requirements, and so on.”
Creating a culture of learning
All of these improvements around training and compliance that WestCare has made by using the Relias Platform has led to a greater culture of learning. In fact, staff members are actively requesting more training from their managers. This is because Relias’ content is built with best practices derived from adult learning theory. Our blended learning platform allows staff members to take a combination of video lectures and interactive courses that both provide information and allow them to practice new skills in a risk-free environment.
On top of this, our platform offers Brain Sparks, a spaced repetition learning tool that sends short, one-to-two question quizzes directly to learners’ inboxes. This helps to reinforce the knowledge they’ve gained in a fast, unobtrusive way.
“I love Brain Sparks,” Hilton said. “And my managers are now really starting to like them because they realize it reinforces content.”
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