Princess Alice Hospice is a charity which was first established in 1980 and is currently operating in Surrey, south west London, and Middlesex. Their vision was to relieve pain and control the symptoms of patients with free palliative and specialist end-of-life care. Since the hospice's official opening, it has grown considerably - with now over 300 employees, 1,200 volunteers, and partnerships with fellow hospices around the UK, Ireland, and Europe.
As part of the provision for specialist patient care, the charity's objective is to provide education to its staff, volunteers, and to the wider community in order to maintain their high quality standards of care and share their specialist knowledge and experience.
Their educational service runs in the form of study days and short courses, including a distance learning course called the "European Certificate in Essential Palliative Care", with over 200 candidates enrolled.
After testing a pilot Moodle site (used at the time by one of its partner hospices), Princess Alice Hospice concluded that the Moodle Open Source e-learning platform met all its requirements and would allow the charity to deliver the specific type of blended learning and collaborative approach they required.
The charity soon elected us as their Moodle supplier, due to our existing experience of working with healthcare organisations, competitive pricing, and the reassurance and confidence we gave the organisation in assisting with their project.
We assisted Princess Alice Hospice in the set up and hosting of their new Moodle website, and some of the charity's core Moodle team attended our Moodle LMS training to enable them to test their new site and explore its features.
As well as this, due to the importance of the charity's representation to the public, the hospice needed to ensure its Moodle theme design was bespoke and in accordance with their requirements. To achieve this we worked closely with the hospice and arranged frequent liaisons to ensure that their theme met their branding requirements fully.
"The availability of social functionality (such as Forums, Chat and Wiki) within Moodle allows the organisation to generate feedback, discussions and for use internally for its mandatory training requirements."
