• education
• education e-learning
• eHIV–STI
• GUM

eHIV–STI, developed by the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) in conjunction with the Royal Colleges of Physicians (RCP) and e-Learning for Healthcare was officially launched in May 2010. It aims to deliver an entire knowledge base of genitourinary medicine specialist registrar curriculum in an e-learning format and is free to all NHS clinical staff.

There are now 76 sessions live and another 45 are in active development. While early sessions covered more introductory material to enable its use for sexually transmitted infection foundation courses, recent additions have covered much more specialist areas covering all areas of the genitourinary medicine curriculum including public health and relevant gynaecology.

The materials are written by subject matter specialists and subject to extensive peer review. Each session is approximately 20 min in length incorporating video clips, case studies and an extensive picture library supported by self-assessment tools. Within the learning management system it is possible to produce reports of personal usage of the material and to generate certificates of completion of individual sessions. The plan is for this ultimately to be directly transferrable into e-portfolios.

As of the end of December 2010 there were over 700 active registered users, most of whom had registered since September 2010. In May 2010 there were 189 attempts at a session, which had increased to 2153 attempts in December 2010. The average time spent on a session was 22 min.

Access for all doctors and for all clinical staff in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is via http://www.e-lfh.org.uk/projects/hiv-sti/register.html.

All other NHS staff in England are required to access the material via the national learning management system (nLMS) through their local trusts. Currently, the introductory sessions are available on the nLMS, but as soon as the current modules under development are complete the plan is to make all the material available on the nLMS, hopefully by May 2011, so that nurses, health advisers and other staff have full access.