 During a time when pressure on the health and care workforce was at an all-time high there was also an increased demand for online training using technology. Health Education England's technology enhanced learning team leads on the application of simulation, immersive and learning technologies to meet the changing needs of health and care professionals throughout their careers as part of education and training to improve patient care. Hi there. Hi Rachel. Hi Richard. How are you doing? Really good. How are you? Yeah, not bad. Yeah. This is how Dr Katrina Butterworth does her GP training these days. But what's been necessitated by COVID-19 restrictions actually came easily because of how technologically advanced learning within the NHS already is. What I asked you to do a few days ago was to have a look at the module on ELFH, looking at vaccines. So we looked at the AstraZeneca one and the Pfizer one. I just wondered how'd you go on with using that? Sure. So I've had some patients asking lots of questions about the side effects of the vaccine. And the e-learning really helped me with that because it gave me some suggested answers to those kind of questions. The e-learning for health care platform is one of the ways Health Education England has made information more accessible and interactive. In the old days we used a lot of textbooks to get a lot of our hard medicine, a lot of the information that we needed. And nowadays we use a lot more of the virtual learning hubs. And so it's like they're like our modern textbooks and they're much better than textbooks really. Even before COVID-19 the educational needs of Britain's health care and medical professionals were changing. More flexible, more interactive, more virtual. And the pandemic has only accelerated this shift to a technologically enhanced learning system. This ecosystem now stretches across several digital hubs and their associated forums as well as a range of other learning technologies. We are custodians of three national learning platforms. We have a platform called E-Learning for Health Care and we have one called the Digital Learning Solution. And then we have one called the Learning Hub. We're talking everything from e-learning delivered over the internet through people's smartphones or over a laptop or different ways of consuming that to things like immersive technologies or extended reality technologies like virtual reality. All the way to things like mannequins for simulating how you might do some sort of procedure which you'd normally do with on a patient. Dr Neil Ralph heads the Technology Enhanced Learning Team within Health Education England. It's pushing this tech drive. We've seen a significant adoption of the e-learning that we put out through our national learning platforms and we've seen the number of users registered to access our learning more than double. So we're over two million registered users across health and care. So two million users for the e-learning for Health Care Hub, they made at least 22 million session launches on the platform last year and there are the three digital platforms for educating the health and care workforce. Emma Hawkesworth is a recently qualified speech and language therapist. Her youth and the fact her final placement was done in lockdown means technology enhanced learning has played a big part in her education. Emma's excited for how virtual reality might help her help her patients. I think it could be really helpful for seeing things that you don't come across very often. So for example, if a child had a submucous cleft palate that would be something that you wouldn't encounter very often. So if there was a way of using VR to see that that could be really helpful because then you would know what you're looking out for in the future. Those whose careers started before this technology revolution can see the benefits too. We've got to make best use of our resources and the biggest resources is clinical time and it does massively reduce the amount of clinical time needed for training if you can do it in your office or at home on a laptop. Practical hands-on learning will always be essential for health and care professionals. But increasingly technology helps meet the changing needs of workforce education and makes learning available for all, whoever or wherever they might be.