Online education in a large scale rehabilitation institution.

Large scale multiple venue institutions face problems when delivering educations to their healthcare staff. The present study is aimed at evaluating the feasibility of relying on e-learning for at least part of the training of the Salvatore Maugeri Foundation healthcare staff. The paper reports the results of the delivery of e-learning courses to the personnel during a span of time of 7 months in order to assess the attitude to online courses attendance, the proportion between administered online education and administered traditional education, the economic sustainability of the online education delivery process. 37% of the total healthcare staff have attended online courses and 46% of nurses have proved to be the very active. The ratio between total number of credits and total number of courses for online and traditional education are respectively 18268/5 and 20354/96. These results point out that eLearning is not at all a niche tool used (or usable) by a limited number of people. Economic sustainability, assessed via personnel work hour saving, has been demonstrated. When distance learning is appropriate, online education is an effective, sustainable, well accepted mean to support and promote healthcare staff's education in a large scale institution.