NHS Lanarkshire is a Health Board in Scotland. It is situated in west central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It serves a mixed urban and rural population of around 650,000 people. It employs around 12,000 staff, the majority of whom are nurses.

NHS Lanarkshire works within the Staff Governance Standard for the NHS in Scotland (http://www.staffgovernance.scot.nhs.uk/). This Standard requires all NHS Boards to demonstrate that staff are well informed; appropriately trained and developed; involved in decisions; treated fairly and consistently, with dignity and respect, in an environment where diversity is valued; and provided with a continuously improving and safe working environment, promoting the health and wellbeing of staff, patients and the wider community.

The Standard also requires all staff to keep themselves up to date with developments relevant to their job within the organisation; commit to continuous personal and professional development; adhere to the standards set by their regulatory bodies; actively participate in discussions on issues that affect them either directly or via their trade union/professional organisation; treat all staff and patients with dignity and respect while valuing diversity; and ensure that their actions maintain and promote the health, safety and wellbeing of all staff, patients and carers.

NHS Lanarkshire has a range of supports in place; a Learning Strategy, a suite of learning policies, several corporate departments to lead and facilitate staff learning, partnership arrangements with professional bodies and trade unions and local further and higher educational institutions, easily accessible in-house e-learning resources, designated executive leads, and formal overseeing arrangements in place.

Examples of learning policies include: induction; personal development planning and review; and access to further and higher education. The designated corporate departments are: Organisational Development and Learning (including library and knowledge management services), Medical Education and the NMAHP (Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions) Practice Development Centre. Executive responsibilities are shared across the Medical, Nursing, Public Health Medicine and Human Resource directors. Management responsibilities are cascaded through the organisational tiers with frontline managers (Senior Charge Nurses and Team Leaders) having clear responsibility for leading and managing the development of their teams. Every member of staff has personal responsibilities for identifying and undertaking the learning required for their role.

Not all learning provided or supported by NHS Lanarkshire is online, but every member of staff has access to internal e-learning through intranet-based information and on-line programmes. This access, together with the provision of several designated IT learning resource facilities also provides for their participation in other web-based internet learning opportunities.

Recognising that not all learning is course based (electronic or classroom) NHS Lanarkshire provides ample opportunities for on-the-job learning by encouraging staff to help others to learn either through formal roles such as mentor or practice education facilitator or through the ongoing provision of formal and informal supervision.