Stakeholder Briefing – Issue 12

Key Messages and links to 1^st July 2020

Welcome to Health Education England’s weekly stakeholder bulletin.

In this bulletin we will provide:

• Weekly message from the Chief Executive’s Office
• Overview of HEE education and training news, and our continued response to COVID-19
• An update from your regional office

Weekly message from the Chief Executive’s Office –

This week’s message is written by Professor Simon Gregory, Deputy Medical Director and Freedom to Speak up Guardian at Health Education England. He writes about health and wellbeing support during and post COVID-19 and our collective influence on practices, curricula and programmes to ensure they value us all, each other and our wellbeing, and support healthy, happy and sustainable careers. Read the full message here.

We are supporting all professions to rapidly grow to meet the needs of patients by:

The importance of risk assessing and supporting rotating junior doctors from a BAME background – On Monday 22 June, HEE and NHS England and NHS Improvement sent a letter to Regional Medical Directors and Regional Postgraduate Deans highlighting the importance of employers having sufficient processes in place to identify, risk assess and support all rotating junior doctors from a BAME background. The letter also highlighted the published guidance on how to enhance risk assessments for staff, particularly for at risk vulnerable groups. 

FAQs for nursing and midwifery students – A set of FAQs for nursing and midwifery students, developed by HEE, the Council of Deans of Health, NHS Employers and union partners, has now been published. The document sets out the transition back to supernumerary placements to enable students to progress with their education or complete their programme and join the NMC register.

UCAS Facebook Live for prospective nursing students – Last week, HEE’s Chief Nurse Mark Radford took part in a UCAS Facebook Live promoting nursing alongside Amy Fancourt, a mental health nursing student and RCN student council member, and Sadeka Davy, a trainee nursing associate. The broadcast covered a range of questions about pursuing nursing as a career and had 24,000 unique viewers with a reach that was twice as big as UCAS’s two previous broadcasts combined. The UCAS Facebook Live is available to view on UCAS’s Facebook page.

We are ensuring core HEE work to support our NHS colleagues continues:

Rapid Expansion of AHP placements: Simulation and Technology Enabled Care Services (TECS) webinar – Whilst we aim to expand our workforce by increasing the number of Allied Health Professionals in education, we need to ensure that we also have adequate good quality placements and learning environments to support this. There is increasing potential to include simulation and TECS* placements as part of this.

We know that many HEIs and Trust are doing this already so aim of the webinar is to:

• Define what we mean by simulated and TECS* placements
• Explain and share the opportunities and resources already in place to support simulation
• Provide the regulatory and professional body position on simulation and TECS placements
• Showcase examples from around the country, many of which are easily generalisable/applicable to different professions and areas.

Presenters will include:

• Beverley Harden, Allied Health Professions Lead, Health Education England & Deputy Chief Allied Health Professions Officer, England
• Brendan Edmonds, HCPC
• Ruth Allerton, AHP Placement Capacity Expansion Project
• The TEL team
• David Marsden, Regional AHP Lead for North East and Yorkshire, HEE

*Technology enabled care services (TECS) refers to the use of telehealth, telecare, telemedicine, telecoaching and self-care in providing care for patients with long term conditions that is convenient, accessible and cost-effective.

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 7 July, 9am-midday. To join on the day, please click here.

Student Number Controls cap (bidding for additional undergraduate healthcare places) – In May, the Department of Health and Social Care announced its support package for universities and students, which included temporary controls capping the number of students for the 2020/21 academic year. The controls allow HEIs to recruit UK and EU students for 2020/21 up to a set level, based on their forecast plus an additional 5%.

To ensure that barriers are not put in the way of increasing the future domestic supply of nursing and allied health professionals, the announcement included a number of dispensations and supporting measures for full-time healthcare courses at degree level. These included an additional 5,000 course places ringfenced for students studying nursing, midwifery or selected allied health profession courses.

HEIs can bid for the additional healthcare places, and the Department for Education’s (DfE) bidding portal opened on Thursday 18th June 2020. Originally set to close on the 26th June 2020, due to extremely strong demand for additional nursing, midwifery and healthcare places, the Department of Health and Social Care and HEE have agreed with DfE to extend the timetable for bids until 5pm on Friday 17th July 2020. HEIs can bid here.

Clinical Placement Expansion Programme – To support healthcare course growth, both planned and as a consequence of the ‘5,000 additional place’ bidding, HEE has launched the Clinical Placement Expansion Programme.

NHS England & NHS Improvement ran the Clinical Placements Support Programme for nursing in 2019, with 142 NHS Trusts working together with their local higher education institutions to create more than 7,500 new nursing clinical placement places. HEE is repeating this scheme for 2020 and expanding this to include placements for students training in selected allied health professions (AHP).

Bids to the Clinical Placements Expansion Programme can complement other funding bids, such as those already entered for AHP clinical facilities and to the Strategic Support Fund. Only by increasing both course places and placement capacity together will see the growth in pre-registration training that the Interim People Plan demands, and we hope to see alignment of bids between bids to the DfE for additional course places and to HEE for clinical placement expansion funding.

There are bidding forms for placement providers/facilitators to complete, and these need to be returned to educationfunding@hee.nhs.uk also by 5pm on Friday 17th July.

These initiatives are central to our ability to deliver growth in undergraduate supply. The determination and innovation shown by Schools of Healthcare throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has helped us to secure them and to provide the reassurance that we can continue to expand undergraduate healthcare courses as previously planned.

COVID-19 Pandemic Recovery Toolkit for NHS Trusts – A toolkit to support NHS Trusts during the recovery phase of the COVID-19 pandemic was developed from a library search requested on Recovery by the Chief Executive of Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which has since been shared with 46 other Trusts.

The toolkit is a collation of resources including sections on recovery planning, capacity and long-term impacts, workforce wellbeing, learning lessons, organisational resilience and innovation and is available to all NHS Trusts.

For any further assistance with evidence and knowledge please do connect with your local library service for your NHS organisations.

A new resource pack to help doctors in Foundation training – On Thursday 25 June, HEE launched a new resource pack to help doctors in Foundation training. HEE worked with partners to produce this pack of new resources aimed at easing student doctors into Foundation training and supporting them during the training programme. It follows HEE’s review of the Foundation Medical Training Programme, which resulted in several recommendations to improve support for trainees, educators, and the wider system. To find out more about this resource pack, read the full update on HEE’s website.

Greater flexibility for doctors in training – As part of HEE’s Medical Education Reform Programme, HEE has announced plans to provide greater flexibility to medical trainees across the country by extending its out of programme pause programme (OOPP) to include all specialties.

To find out more about the new plans, read the full update on HEE’s website. Please note, HEE are managing these opportunities locally – trainees should contact their local hubs directly to find out more.

An innovative approach to Allied Health Profession (AHP) clinical placements – HEE recently shared a blog from Char, an AHP student from the south east who introduced readers to the AHP placement project she is working on with Clever Together. This project aims to generate insight from the AHP sector to facilitate and support the spread of innovation in relation to clinical placements, as part of the response to COVID-19.

To help achieve this HEE will be launching an online workshop to consider a number of questions in relation to AHP placements and how to overcome the challenges presented by COVID-19. All the feedback will be captured, analysed, and shared widely in the AHP community to innovate together.

Choose GP – The next round of GP specialty training applications opens from 28 July – 13 August (for a February 2021 start). Follow ‘Choose GP’ on Facebook or find case studies, FAQs and career information on the GP National Recruitment Office (GP NRO) website.

We are making sure all professions have the training they need to make a difference:

elfh COVID-19 programme – The elearning for healthcare (elfh) COVID-19 programme is still being well used by the health and care workforce responding to the pandemic.  Since its launch in March 2020 there have been 1.57 million session launches and during June 2020 the programme averaged 10,000 session launches each day.

For more information about the programme please visit: www.e-lfh.org.uk/coronavirus/

Other elfh resources – HEE elfh has worked with Skills for Care to add new content to the Care Certificate elearning programme.

The Care Certificate programme is an identified set of standards that health and social care workers adhere to in their daily working life. Designed with the unregistered workforce in mind, the Care Certificate was developed to provide structured and consistent learning to ensure that care workers have the same introductory skills, knowledge and behaviours to provide compassionate, safe, quality care and support.

New scenario sessions have been launched to support learners working towards the 15 Standards of the Care Certificate. The scenarios are an opportunity for learners to apply the principles behind the Care Certificate in a range of settings and represents the breadth of environments where the Care Certificate can be applied.

The existing scenario sessions, which were launched in 2018, have also been updated are now suitable for those who wish to learn via a mobile phone.

The new scenario session settings are:

• Maternity
• Learning disability
• Homeless
• Reablement
• Pre-hospital

The updated scenario settings are:

• Primary care
• Mental health
• Acute
• End-of-life
• Home care

For more information on the Care Certificate elearning programme, see: https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/care-certificate/

Last month the National Breast Imaging Academy (NBIA), in partnership with HEE elfh, launched their elearning programme for radiographers, radiologists and breast clinicians.

elearning sessions are part of the NBIA’s aim to provide online learning to complement face-to-face clinical training. The sessions are designed to support trainees in breast imaging and to provide valuable continuing professional development (CPD) resources for all qualified staff.

The full programme of elearning sessions is due to launch in Autumn, but many sessions are available now, to support your training needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What’s new in June 2020?

There are now over 60 elearning sessions are available via the elfh Hub. New sessions added recently include:

• Advanced Ultrasound Techniques 1 Elastography
• Assessment for Mammographers
• Axillary Staging in Breast Cancer Patients
• Day in the Life of a Breast Clinician
• Day in the Life of a Histopathologist
• Interpreting Contrast-enhanced Spectral Mammography
• Living With, Through and Beyond Breast Cancer
• Mammographic Artefacts
• MRI Artefacts
• MRI in Breast Cancer
• QA, Standards and Guidance
• Ultrasound Interpretation – Solid Benign Masses

Additional sessions will be added to the elearning catalogue as soon as they are ready.

For further information about the NBIA please visit:  www.nationalbreastimagingacademy.org.

For more information about the sessions, including details on how to access the NBIA elearning programme, please visit: https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/national-breast-imaging-academy/.

Supporting the well-being of the health and care Workforce –

HEE podcasts

HEE’s Professional Support Unit (PSU) has released two new professional development and SuppoRTT podcasts to support trainees during COVID-19. The most recent podcast episode is:

• Perspectives from the frontline and the sidelines

To find out more or to listen to the podcasts, visit either HEE’s anchor.fm profile here or HEE’s Spotify profile here 

FURTHER INFORMATION

By following @NHS_HealthEdEng you can keep up to date with new information and resources as they are published. Most importantly are the notifications of webinars being broadcast during the week.

Right now, making sure we are communicating properly is obviously incredibly important. If there’s any information you think is missing on HEE’s webpages, please let us know by submitting your question to the HEE Q&A helpdesk.