How Northumbria NHS Trust trains 12K staff, 86% faster
We spoke with the learning and development team at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust about how they use Synthesia to train more than 12,000 staff.
86% less time
to make a video
1000+ videos
created from a small team
12K staff
across 10 hospitals trained
Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest NHS organisations in England geographically, caring for more than half a million people across Northumberland and North Tyneside — an area that stretches from the edge of Newcastle to the Scottish border. More than 12,000 staff work across its 10 hospitals and community services.
Industry Context
Everyone who works in the NHS — surgeon, nurse, cleaner, or administrator — has to complete compulsory training courses on subjects like fire safety, infection control, and data protection. Much of this is set nationally .
Delivering all of it — and keeping it engaging, current, and genuinely relevant — is a never-ending job. And in a hospital, training that doesn't land isn't a tick-box problem. It's a patient-safety one.
The challenge
Northumbria's learning and development team is responsible for training all 12,000 of those staff, across 10 hospitals and one of the biggest areas any NHS trust covers. For years, they did it with PowerPoint.
The compulsory national courses arrived as pre-defined, compulsory online packages— generic content that never once mentioned Northumbria, its hospitals, or its people. And they were slow to change: when a rule was updated or a new risk emerged, even a small revision meant rebuilding a module by hand, with specialists working tirelessly for weeks before the new version reached a screen. Staff clicked through it and forgot it.
The solution
Three years ago, the team started building their training in Synthesia instead, and the change was immediate.
The courses became short, clear videos. Instead of anonymous national slides, the team created bolt ons to the national content, including specific information around Northumbria's own hospitals, rules, and ways of working, presented by on-screen avatars — including familiar faces from across the trust.
What used to take weeks now takes about two days, and a small in-house team has gone on to make more than 1,000 videos, with dozens more added every month.
The safety briefings for the trust facilities management subsidiary moved online too. They became short videos any member of staff can watch on a phone or laptop, on a break, at their own pace — a world away from instructions read aloud off a sheet of paper in a morning meeting.
What the team values most:
- Speed: A finished video in about two days, not weeks — so urgent training reaches staff while it still matters.
- Relevance: National courses rebuilt around Northumbria's own hospitals, teams, and ways of working.
- Avatars: A trusted face on screen, with no camera, studio, or reshoots — and updates in minutes when something changes.
The results
The team set out to make better training, faster. What changed went further than that:
- 86% less time to make a video — down from weeks to about two days.
- 1,000+ videos produced in-house by a small team, with dozens more every month.
- One consistent standard of training across all 10 hospitals and community services.
None of this is really about videos. It's about whether Northumbria's people are ready for the job in front of them — and whether the training that gets them there can keep pace with how fast that job changes. Now it can. A small team trains 12,000 colleagues across 10 hospitals on what matters, in days instead of weeks, with content built for their world and no one else's.
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