By Healthcare Facilities Today

Bill Warren, the manager of training and development for the facilities engineering and maintenance department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian Shadyside Hospital, discusses his facility's web-based training program in a podcast on Facilitiesnet.com. The implementation of the program earned the facility a 2013 Facility Maintenance Decisions Achievement Award.

UPMC operates more than 20 academic, community, and specialty hospitals and 400 outpatient sites, employs more than 3,200 physicians, and offers an array of rehabilitation, retirement, and long-term care facilities. 

According to Warren, there was a need for a consistent and standardized work-safety training program to meet regulatory requirements for our maintenance employees. At UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, the maintenance department worked together with the hospital's environmental health and safety department to develop a set of work safety training courses for our maintenance crafts employees. 

Warren turned to health system's learning and development department's computer-based staff learning and development training network called uLearn. In collaboration with the learning and development and environmental health and safety departments, the maintenance staff worked to create computer-based work safety training modules, specific to their training needs.

The uLearn work safety trainings were then  made available to maintenance department staffs online. This served as an alternative to having monthly classroom/in-person trainings. 

The pilot program was rolled out at UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside in 2012 with great success, according to Warren. It has since expanded and is now available to all of the health system's facilities. 

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.