The single most emotive institution in the UK is undoubtedly the National Health Service. Hailed as a triumph of social medicine on its post-war creation, it was a foundation of the entire Welfare State.

More recently, it has been battered by changing political ideologies, while remaining a focus of endless national debate and passion over spending priorities, waiting lists and crumbling infrastructure.

Last year, the Blair government announced an unprecedented investment in the NHS. As Chancellor Gordon Brown argued in April, the aim was to "secure the NHS, not just for a year or two but for the long term".

Whitehall has declared that the huge £65.4bn 2002-03 budget, and then an extra £40bn of funding over the next five years, should go a long way to improving patient care.

However, NHS bosses are going to spend some of this cash on, of all things, their own university, the NHSU. Have they gone mad? Far from it, according to Catherine Hastings, director of communications at the fledgling institution.

"Learning should play a significant role in the NHS, to help existing staff work more effectively and help us attract and retain the kind of staff we want," she explained.

NHSU will start offering courses this autumn (for more information see the institution's website at www.nhsu.nhs.uk). The project is an attempt to create the NHS's own 'corporate university'.

These institutions are more usually found in large private sector organisations, and the term is taken to mean an internal resource that takes care of all internal development, training and learning.

The NHSU is that and more. It will use a variety of mechanisms, including e-learning, to deliver courses that will work for its entire workforce, in all areas in which they need education.

Over time, it will largely replace the 65 higher education institutions the NHS currently uses.

The NHSU's offering will include NHS induction courses, general literacy and language skills education, IT awareness training, specific courses on cleaning and infection control, courses on new surgical techniques, and academic qualifications such as special NHS Foundation degrees and masters degrees in NHS administration.

All NHS staff will be given 'protected' time off work to study if they want it, according to Hastings.

Work to be done
Some figures will put the NHSU's huge task in perspective. The NHS workforce isn't just big - it's very diverse, too.

Of its 1.3 million workers (June 2001 figures), 236,240 are managers and administrators, 60,000 work in maintenance, 80,000 are scientific staff and 20,000 are ambulance staff.

Nearly 360,000 nurses join every year and many staff come from mixed educational backgrounds: this year 90,000 NHS workers will be offered literacy, numeracy and English skills education, for example.

Can the NHSU possibly provide the kind of tailored deliverables it says it wants to? Hastings believes it can. "Our watchwords are flexibility and variety," she said.

But some observers, even those who say they are friendly, are sceptical. "It's going to be a major challenge to satisfy such a varied audience," warned Neil Bindemann, managing director of Primed Communications, a supplier of online medical education packages.

Others argue that there is enough commitment to the NHSU to justify optimism.

"A lot of thought has gone into making the NHSU a real skills escalator for its users," said Devrim Celal, head of e-learning services at the UK arm of US technology consultancy firm Sapient.

"There's a lot of emphasis in prototyping and making sure things are tailored for all members, from the GP to the surgeon to the porter.

"The university development team is also really talking to stakeholders and getting detailed ethnographic information about them to tailor the content. They're really trying to make the courses fit into the work lifecycle too."

But surely all this emphasis on e-learning should be cause for concern. Just as the public sector is rushing into e-learning, there is a retreat from it in the private sector, where many companies have found that sweeping away their classroom training and going electronic seems to have mainly resulted in no one bothering to do much training.

Lessons from the Open University
However, there is a counter argument which says that maybe the public sector and big projects such as the NHSU are the right arena for e-learning.

That's the view of Diana Laurillard, head of e-learning at the Department for Education and Skills.

Laurillard has been seconded from the Open University to co-ordinate all central government e-learning strategy.

She told vnunet.com's sister title Information World Review: "E-learning is the business of education, and it's not easy to make it a profit-making business.

"E-learning companies haven't been aware of what it actually takes to do that business of education; it's a complex business, and it takes a long time to build the trust and confidence needed."

Her suggestion is that, instead of taking the shaky experiences of the first generation of e-learning in corporations as a benchmark, we should look at the Open University (OU).

It is worth remembering that, in ambition and scale, building the OU - a world first in open access education - was easily as difficult as creating the NHSU.

The OU opened its doors in 1971 and is now the UK's largest university. It has 200,000 enrolled students, which gives it 22 per cent of all part-time higher education enrolees in the country. And it seems to have learnt to satisfy a diverse 'customer' base.