NHS England's new learning hub

The solution helps healthcare professionals quickly find the learning resources they need to stay up to date in a rapidly changing environment.

About the customer

NHS England supports a large and diverse healthcare workforce operating in a rapidly evolving clinical environment.

Maintaining a skilled and knowledgeable workforce is critical for the National Health Service (NHS), one of the world's largest employers. NHS staff rely on access to high-quality educational, training and professional development resources to continuously build capabilities and keep pace with advances in healthcare.

To support this mission, NHS England set out to create a new Learning Hub that would bring together learning resources from multiple systems into a single, intuitive experience.

Opportunity

Making thousands of learning resources easier to find and use

Tens of thousands educational resources were distributed across numerous learning portals and repositories, covering courses, programmes, sessions, catalogues and other content formats.

The rapid growth of healthcare knowledge requires continuous additions and updates to learning materials. At the same time, many resources contained limited or inconsistent metadata, making it difficult for users to find the most relevant content.

NHS England needed a solution capable of unifying access to learning resources while improving discoverability through intelligent search and automated content enrichment.

Solution

Knowledge graphs and semantic enrichment power more intelligent search

The Learning Hub solution combines AI-powered search, semantic enrichment and knowledge graph technology to create a more intelligent learning experience, supported by Findwise i3, PoolParty, Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Before content is indexed, Findwise i3 enriches learning resources by analysing available metadata, including titles and descriptions. Concepts identified in the content are matched against NHS healthcare knowledge models to understand relationships between topics and areas of expertise.

This semantic enrichment process automatically generates consistent metadata and identifies the concepts that best describe each resource. As a result, learning content becomes easier to discover, even when relevant concepts are not explicitly mentioned in the original metadata.

The solution continuously leverages knowledge graph relationships to provide greater context, improve search relevance and support more intuitive navigation across learning resources.

Result

A smarter and more connected learning experience for NHS staff

The NHS Learning Hub went live in May 2020, earlier than originally planned to help meet the urgent demands created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

By adding structure, context and semantic understanding to learning resources, the platform enables more accurate search results and a more intuitive user experience. Healthcare professionals can more quickly identify relevant learning resources through intelligent search and automated classification.

Search performance and content discoverability continue to be improved through the analysis of user behavior, feedback and search interactions, helping NHS England continuously refine the Learning Hub experience.

Leng-term impact

Building a sustainable learning platform

The Learning Hub established a scalable foundation for intelligent resource discovery across NHS England. Following successful adoption of the platform, NHS England continued the development and evolution of the Learning Hub within its own organization, building on the foundations established through the project.