EHPAD training plan: how to build it, fund it and make it genuinely useful

Three sessions on dignity in care signed off this year, and no visible change on the floor six months later. That is the scenario every quality manager without a clear method dreads. A good plan has to answer two demands at once: compliance with regulatory obligations and with the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS, the French national health authority), and a real effect on day-to-day practice. This article sets out a concrete method for prioritising requests, funding sessions, and making skills last inside your teams. It applies to EHPADs — French residential care homes for dependent older people — and, more broadly, to any social or medico-social establishment.

What is an EHPAD training plan actually for?

Treating this document as a list of obligations misses the point. It serves three distinct purposes:

• securing compliance with the HAS evaluation framework
• turning the priorities set by management into concrete initiatives for teams
• playing a direct role in retaining staff in a sector under constant pressure

Tip

The findings of your last HAS visit are a direct input for setting priorities. Every gap flagged on a mandatory criterion calls for a targeted action the following year.

The regulatory framework and the employer's obligations

The duty to train staff exists across all three types of EHPAD ownership, but it does not come from the same text. In the private sector, article L6321-1 of the French Labour Code requires the employer to keep staff fit for their role and to maintain their ability to hold a job as occupations evolve. In the public hospital sector, the same duty flows from the public hospital service statute: law no. 86-33 of 9 January 1986 (article 41) and its implementing decree no. 2008-824 of 21 August 2008 — the text that also sets how the plan is funded, which we come back to below.

On top of that, whatever the ownership status, come safety courses specific to healthcare, such as AFGSU 2 (emergency care skills certification), valid for four years and renewable only through a one-day refresher course (order of 30 December 2014, as amended). That is a deadline to put in the calendar, not an action to reschedule once the certificate has already lapsed.

Aligning with the HAS framework and the establishment's project

The HAS evaluation framework, published in March 2022, organises social and medico-social establishments and services (ESSMS) around 157 criteria — 129 common to all and 28 specific to the type of establishment and the people it supports — of which 18 are classed as mandatory. An external visit, carried out by an accredited body, takes place every five years. The priorities set for the year, on the other hand, usually come from an internal focus: end-of-life care, preventing mistreatment, or any other area management has identified. The training plan then becomes a piece of evidence: every session has to stay documented so it can be presented when the evaluators come.

Which courses belong in the plan (without turning it into a catalogue)

Rather than a fixed list of topics copied from one establishment to the next, it is better to think in families of needs. Each establishment then calibrates its own mix according to its internal diagnosis: resident profiles, quality feedback, available headcount.

The families of needs to cover

• Care and support: dignity in care (bientraitance), end-of-life care, Alzheimer's disease and cognitive disorders
• Safety: AFGSU 2, PRAP 2S for manual handling and posture, infection risk prevention and clinical cleaning, including its technical side
• Quality management: preparing for the external visit, risk management, everyday ethical questions
• Communication and relationships: professional conduct, communicating with families, building the relationship with residents

No establishment needs to cover every family every year. One that has just been flagged on a mandatory criterion will put quality management first. Another, facing high staff turnover or a reorganisation, will weight its plan towards supporting new arrivals. There is no universal template that fits every establishment.

Separating mandatory from strategic training

Some courses are not up for discussion: they follow from a regulatory obligation or a safety requirement, as is the case for mandatory workplace training generally. Others are a deliberate choice to build capability, taken to support a priority or strengthen a specific practice. The plan gains from keeping these two blocks clearly apart rather than merging them into one list.

How to build the plan, step by step

The method for building this document follows a sequence, even though each step feeds the next. Six moments structure the work: diagnosing needs, collecting requests, prioritising them, costing them, scheduling, and then follow-up.

The purpose stays the same at every step: matching available resources to what the floor actually needs, without losing sight of that purpose in favour of the budget constraint alone.

The diagnosis draws on several cross-referenced sources: each member of staff's job description and annual review, internal priorities, and quality feedback from the floor. An individual tracking sheet, kept up to date through the year, then makes collecting requests much easier. That base is what stops the plan from floating free of what teams actually need.

Checklist: the six steps

• Diagnose needs (reviews, internal priorities, quality feedback)
• Collect individual and collective requests
• Prioritise against an objective set of criteria
• Cost the sessions retained
• Schedule them across the year
• Track implementation and adjust continuously

Collecting and prioritising requests: the criteria grid

Collecting requests is never the bottleneck. Arbitrating between them is. Without an explicit grid, prioritisation tends to follow seniority or whoever happens to be available, at the expense of overall coherence.

An objective grid makes it possible to decide. It brings together several dimensions, each weighted according to the priorities that have been set.

Costing and funding the plan

Funding works through different levers depending on the establishment's legal status. In the public hospital sector, regulation requires at least 2.1% of the payroll to be devoted to funding the plan (decree no. 2008-824 of 21 August 2008, article 10). In practice, almost all establishments pay that amount to the ANFH as voluntary members, and the ANFH then collects and manages those funds on their behalf. In the private sector, non-profit and commercial alike, OPCO Santé acts as the skills funding body: it covers both the non-profit health, social and medico-social branch and private hospitals, which is where commercial EHPADs sit.

These pooled funds are topped up by each establishment's own budget. It is worth identifying, for every action tied to a regulatory obligation, which funding source it draws on before writing it into the plan. Rather than quoting unverified figures, it is better to work from the rates currently published by the ANFH or OPCO Santé, which change every year.

The blind spot in EHPAD training plans: making the learning stick

A completed session guarantees nothing in itself. That is the blind spot in most plans: they stop at the attendance sheet, without ever checking whether the reflex taught survives three months later on the floor.

There is an explanation for this. The forgetting curve, demonstrated by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885, shows that content which is never reactivated dissolves quickly after it is learned. This consolidation problem is especially critical for safety or dignity-in-care reflexes, where a poorly fixed habit puts the resident directly at risk.

Key point

Training someone and making them lastingly competent are two different things. The first transmits knowledge at a given moment. The second requires regular reactivation — the only thing that turns that knowledge into a reflex that holds over time.

Since Robert and Elizabeth Bjork's work on desirable difficulties — the idea that learning made deliberately a little more demanding embeds better than learning that feels smooth — several principles from cognitive science make it possible to organise that consolidation concretely.

Spacing means distributing the review of the same content over time rather than concentrating it into a single session: an effect established by Cepeda et al.'s (2006) meta-analysis, which pools 317 studies.

Retrieval practice, or the trial, error and feedback effect, asks the learner to actively retrieve information before receiving the correction, which embeds it in memory far better than simply re-reading (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Interleaving mixes several types of case rather than treating them in blocks, forcing the brain to work out each time which reflex to bring to bear.

Finally, adapting the level of difficulty adjusts the complexity of the cases presented to each professional's actual level: not so easy that it stops being engaging, not so hard that it stops being accessible.

These principles share one counter-intuitive feature: they slow immediate performance, giving the impression that learning has become harder. It is precisely that effort which produces retention and transfer far above an easy session quickly forgotten — which is exactly why they matter so much for training in care settings. Cognitive science applied to learning covers these mechanisms in more depth.

These principles have been documented for decades, yet few training set-ups genuinely organise them: putting them into practice means steering reactivation over time, not just delivering a module and filing the attendance sheet. That is exactly what an all-in-one training platform built on cognitive science does. At Didask, 94% of learners report that the training is useful in their actual work (1,780 learners, Nov. 2025).

Measuring the real impact of training

Three indicators go further than the attendance sheet, and each one rests on something that already exists in your establishment.

• Whether the reflexes are actually applied is observed in situ, during manager walk-rounds and practice observations — not in a satisfaction questionnaire filled in at the end of the session.
• How practice evolves can be read in adverse-event reports on the topic that was taught: their nature often changes before their number falls.
• The results obtained are measured on the quality indicators you already track: falls, malnutrition, pressure ulcers, complaints from families.

This monitoring feeds directly into preparing for the next HAS visit, because it documents the real effect of the sessions delivered, beyond the certificates alone. A plan that produces visible results also has a measurable side effect: it holds on to teams better, in a context where turnover is a constant reality.

Keeping the plan alive all year

A document frozen in a January spreadsheet loses its relevance fast. A quarterly review makes it possible to correct course, push back a delayed session, or add an urgent request nobody anticipated at the start of the year — with the whole management line behind it.

Integrating new arrivals deserves particular attention. Staff turnover in the sector is high, and neglecting the onboarding of new recruits leaves a gaping blind spot: professionals start in post without ever having covered the basics already taught to the rest of the team.

Finally, building on what was done during the year — results, feedback from teams, gaps observed — feeds the next diagnosis. That is a shared responsibility between management and frontline managers. A living plan is built as a continuous loop, not as an isolated exercise redone from scratch every year.

Conclusion

A successful EHPAD training plan rests on three pillars: requests properly prioritised, funding identified from the outset, and learning that is still there long after the session. It is that last dimension, too often neglected, which separates a plan that produces effects from a document that ticks boxes.

For teams under pressure, in a sector marked by high turnover, what is at stake goes beyond regulatory compliance. Training more effectively also means retaining people for longer.