Across the NHS, ePortfolios have become a familiar part of the learning landscape. They document progress, record evidence, and provide reassurance that required activity has taken place. For a time that was enough. But increasingly, Trusts are asking a more difficult question: what actually changes as a result?
Because documenting learning is not the same as embedding it into practice.
“We weren’t just looking for a system that documents learning — we needed confidence that learning would transfer into practice, and that’s where People Alchemy stood out.”
Head of Nursing Education, NHS Trust
The gap most platforms don’t address
Many ePortfolio systems do a competent job of recording learning activity. They capture uploads, sign-offs and pathways. From a compliance perspective, the boxes are ticked.
What they rarely address is what happens next.
How does learning move from:
- a course or module
- into day-to-day clinical behaviour
- and ultimately into better patient care?
This is the theory–practice gap that NHS teams recognise instinctively, even if it is not always named as such. It is also the point at which many digital learning systems quietly stop.
Learning transfer, not learning storage
People Alchemy did not start life as an ePortfolio provider. We started with a different problem altogether: learning transfer.
Our original focus was on a simple but stubborn challenge — how do you ensure that when people attend training, they actually do something differently afterwards? That thinking shaped everything that followed.
When NHS organisations later asked whether this learning workflow approach could support portfolios, supervision and assessment, the fit was immediate. The portfolio functionality was built around learning transfer, not bolted on afterwards.
The result is a platform that does more than store evidence. It actively supports the journey from learning to practice.
Why this matters for NHS organisations
For Trusts comparing platforms, the distinction becomes clear quite quickly.
Most systems are designed to answer the question:
“Can we prove this happened?”
People Alchemy is designed to support a different one:
“Can we be confident this made a difference?”
That confidence comes from workflows that:
- link learning directly to expected behaviours
- support observation and reflective supervision
- reinforce application at the point of work
- keep the focus on practice, not paperwork
This is particularly important in areas such as clinical skills, care certificates and early-career support, where the consequences of learning not transferring into practice are real and immediate.
Beyond tick boxes
NHS teams are under constant pressure to evidence compliance. That pressure is real and unavoidable.
But there is a growing recognition that compliance alone is not the goal. A system that simply documents activity risks becoming little more than a spreadsheet with a better interface.
The more important question is whether the system helps people get better at what they do. That is the difference between ticking a box and improving patient care — and it is where learning transfer stops being a theory and starts becoming a practical design principle.
>> If this question resonates with you, the most useful next step is to explore learning transfer itself and the principles behind it: Learning Transfer Guide
>> More about the drive in the NHS to go digital…
