Publish date: 23 January 2024
NHS staff complete top qualifications to bolster clinical education and patient care
A leading NHS trust has taken another step to boost its workforce development by supporting staff to complete a qualification usually limited to those in higher education.
An initial cohort of nine staff at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust qualified last year with a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice plus a Higher Education Academy Fellowship – after completing a programme mostly taught to university staff to support them to become lecturers.
They are the first educators in the country to undertake the programme who are employed in clinical practice and not at a university, and a second cohort is following fast on their heels – all thanks to a collaboration with Northumbria University.
It comes as the trust continues to focus on education, learning and development as a means of supporting the recruitment and retention of staff – a key challenge for the NHS today. This in turn supports high-quality patient care.
Emma Dawes, Northumbria Healthcare’s head of nursing, midwifery and allied health professional education and workforce development, explained why the trust had supported its staff to carry out Northumbria University’s Academic Professional Higher Apprenticeship (APHA) programme.
“We have a range of clinical staff that work in education roles who have never formally trained to be educators, so we wanted to upskill them to improve the quality and governance of the education we offer right across the organisation,” she said.
“It’s important to us to have highly skilled professionals looking after our patients, who deserve nothing less, and to help us to do that, it’s important to have highly skilled clinical educators to make that happen.
“One of the big things we’ve seen is how confident the staff have become in their approach to delivering education. That’s made a real difference to the quality of the teaching. It’s allowed them to be more aspirational and experiment more, and we’ve seen some brilliant things come out of that.”
Having staff with these high-level qualifications comes as Northumbria Healthcare prepares to take its education provision into an innovative new era.
In July, it was announced that Northumbria Healthcare had signed a multimillion-pound partnership with the University of Sunderland, leading to the development of a range of academic programmes and apprenticeships designed to enhance and develop the skills of healthcare professionals.
The focal point will be the £32 million Northumbria Health and Care Academy, on the site of the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital (NSECH) in Cramlington. The Academy is due to be completed in spring this year.
The University partnership means that it will be the first establishment of its kind in the region and just the second in the country.
Emma added: “We are delighted to be working with both Sunderland and Northumbria universities to develop our education offer. We are lucky to have world-class universities in the North East and positive relationships to work with them on different projects.
“Having our own staff trained as highly skilled educators, building on their clinical backgrounds, can only add to the success of the Academy moving forward. We are genuinely excited about the trailblazing steps we are taking to develop our workforce of the future.”
Media contact
Ben O’Connell, external communications manager, Northumbria Healthcare
Benjamin.O'Connell@northumbria-healthcare.nhs.ukor