Key Messages and links to 7 January 2022
Welcome to Health Education England’s regular stakeholder bulletin. In this bulletin we will provide:
- Chief Executive updates
- COVID-19 latest updates
- Overview of HEE education and training news
- An update from your regional office
Chief Executive updates
New Year message from Dr Navina Evans
We enter 2022 with the NHS facing unprecedented demand. It truly is a winter like no other. The past two years have taken, and continue to have, an inevitable strain on our NHS people and our health and care learners across all professions, whose training and education is a key part of NHS service delivery and frontline patient care every single day.
The pandemic has had a huge impact on us all both personally and professionally. Our learners have been at the forefront of the NHS COVID response with doctors in training and placement student nurses, midwives, AHPs and healthcare scientists, caring for patients whilst doing everything they can to keep their training and education on track to ensure they can continue to progress with their careers safely and enter the workforce on time to safeguard supply.
Our health and care learners, educators and partners in training and education delivery should be incredibly proud of their personal and collective contributions. Vince Lombardi, the former American football coach, said, ‘The measure of who we are, is what we do with what we have,’ and he was right. I can only continue to repeat our gratitude for all that you do. Read more on the HEE website.
HEE COVID-19 latest updates
We have created a COVID-19 update webpage that provides guidance and information from HEE, which applies to all students and trainees. This webpage also includes HEE COVID-19 surge guidance.
To keep up to date with plans for medical training recovery, visit HEE COVID-19 webpages.
COVID Vaccination
Health Education England (HEE) is encouraging all health and care trainees, students and learners, to ensure they have had both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine unless they are medically exempt.
The recent amendments to The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 (“the 2014 Regulations”) require all colleagues over 18, who have direct, face to face contact with service users to evidence that they have received a complete course of an approved COVID-19 vaccine, subject to limited exceptions, by no later than 1 April 2022.
This means that all students on placements in any CQC regulated service will need to be fully vaccinated by 1 April 2022. In practical terms this means all those who have yet to be fully vaccinated and who are not exempt will need to have their first vaccination by 3 February 2022 in order to receive their second dose by 31 March 2022.
Please see below for key dates:
- 6 January – Regulations made. Start of 12-week grace period
- 3 February – 8 weeks before regulations are enforced (and the period required between the first and second vaccination dose).
- 1 April – Regulations enforced. All staff in scope must be fully vaccinated or have secured a medical exemption.
HEE is working with the Council of Deans for Health and others to develop a set of FAQs to support students and universities over the coming weeks.
Book your coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination
We are supporting all professions to rapidly grow to meet the needs of patients:
Multi-Disciplinary Updates
A new e-Portfolio for Advanced Practitioners launched
A supported e-Portfolio route for advanced practitioners has been launched to enable the education and training of Advanced Practitioners. It has been recognised by the Centre for Advancing Practice and will help individuals working in advanced practice roles to be supported in evidencing their advanced clinical practice. It will also give practitioners the opportunity to identify any gaps in their learning and to potentially be offered further learning opportunities to help close these gaps. Read more on the HEE advancing practice website.
Medical
Less than Full Time (LTFT) training webinars
A series of three webinars are being held in mid-January for doctors in training who may be interested in the option of Less than Full Time training. The webinars will provide an introduction to LTFT training, discuss the trainee perspective of the LTFT experience and give the opportunity to ask questions. Recent research has shown that Less than Full Time training can impact very positively on trainees; for example 78% of trainees reported a positive impact on their sense of work/life balance.
The three webinars will be broadly the same presentations, but will feature different speakers and are at different times of the day to enable as many trainees as possible to watch. We are taking questions in advance of the webinars, as well as live Q&As during the events.
Mental health
Psychological Professions Workforce Plan for England
HEE has published the Psychological Professions Workforce Plan for England. The plan aims to support local systems to meet the requirement to deliver growth in the psychological professions workforce by over 60 per cent and make use of the diverse roles available to deliver services, as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.
HEE and NHS England and Improvement are now working with partners across health and care systems locally, regionally and nationally to make this a reality and this plan will facilitate the required actions by all stakeholders. For more information and to view the plan click here.
Workforce and education initiatives
Healthcare evidence and knowledge now a simple search away
The new, HEE funded, NHS Knowledge and Library Hub, is a ‘one-stop’ gateway which, for the first time nationally, connects NHS staff and learners seamlessly to a significant range of free, high-quality knowledge and evidence resources, services, tools and databases, all in one place.
Content of the easy-to-use platform includes over 7,000 journals, e-books – including OUP handbooks, clinical decision support tools – such as BMJ Best Practice, NICE pathways and guidelines and clinical and medical databases.
Accessed via OpenAthens, users will be able to tap into the same system wherever their career takes them. Start your search or learn more through our short user guides. Updates will be posted on our new Twitter channel – follow us @NHSKFH
Building appropriate confidence in AI to enable safe and ethical adoption
Join the second in our Digital, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technologies in Education (DART-Ed) webinar series looking at how safe, effective and ethical adoption of AI technology in healthcare relies on clinician confidence, and how this can be built. The session takes place on 1 Feb 2022. You can sign up for a place and view a recording of the previous webinar on our website.
elearning for healthcare
Keep up to date with all the latest additions to the elfh platform 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.
