Reviewed a 400-item national learning catalogue for removal or retention​

Client and setting​

A national health education body, for the population health learning catalogue on its e-learning platform across 17 programmes​

The challenge​

The catalogue had built up over years with no systematic review. Links had broken, some material pre-dated current guidance and terminology, and nobody could say what was still safe to recommend. The team did not have the capacity, or easy access to public health specialist judgement in-house, to work through several hundred items, and needed something it could load straight back into the platform.​

What we did

• Wrote an appraisal method others could repeat: twelve fields covering whether the link works, how the material is accessed, who published it, its format and length, when it was published and last updated, whether it matches current legislation and clinical guidance, and whether the language is still acceptable.​

• Tested the method before using it at scale. Three reviewers appraised the same 20 resources separately, then went through them line by line to agree how to handle disagreements.​

• Worked through the whole catalogue, around 440 items across 17 programmes, checking every link, finding replacements where they existed, and recording the reason for each decision.​

• Appraised about 100 further resources put forward for inclusion and handed back files the client’s team could upload directly.​

The outcome​

Around 330 resources were kept, roughly 100 removed and a handful referred back for a client decision. Sixty-five broken links were replaced and 13 could not be. The client ended up with a catalogue it could defend, a record of why each decision was made, and a method its own team can run again.​

Timescale and team​

Six weeks from start to finish. Two public health specialists and an analyst, so specialist judgement was applied at analyst pace.​