Stakeholder Briefing – Issue 7

Key Messages and links to 27^th May 2020

Welcome to Health Education England’s weekly COVID-19 stakeholder bulletin.

HEE is working with partners to support the system-wide response to COVID-19. Our priority is to ensure trainees and learners are kept informed of immediate changes to their training and recruitment, as well as to support returners to the NHS.

In this bulletin we will provide:

• Overview of HEE and our partner’s national response to COVID-19
• An update from your regional office
• Signposting to useful resources and contact information

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

Medical Training – The medical training rotations webinar took place on Tuesday 26 May. The session covered the background to the Covid-19 response so far and an overview of plans for August rotations. The recording of the session will be available in due course on YouTube.

The next webinar will take place on Wednesday 3 June 7pm, the focus of this webinar will be ARCP and will be led by Professor Sheona MacLeod, Acting Director of Education and Quality and Executive Medical Director and guest speakers will include representatives from the GMC and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. The link to join the session will be shared on HEEs social media channels nearer the date.

Feedback Sessions for Healthcare Learners – Health Education England has sent a call to healthcare learners deployed during COVID; to include student AHPs, nurses, midwives and Interim Foundation Doctors. We are running the virtual feedback sessions on Thursday 4 and Monday 8 June; to specifically capture learners experiences around support and training.

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

COVID-19 Patient Information for Vulnerable Groups – As we all know it is vital that we and the healthcare workforce can communicate with all our audiences effectively. During the Coronavirus pandemic the need to do so is even more acute.

HEE’s Library and Knowledge Services  team has developed a website which contains high quality patient information that meets the information needs of specific patient groups, and for people that require or prefer information in accessible formats such as easy read, sign language, and Makaton. This enables frontline health and care staff who directly work with patient, clients, and families to find, share and use reliable COVID-19 information. The website at https://library.nhs.uk/coronavirus-resources/ includes material on the following:

• coronavirus resources in accessible format
• coronavirus resources for older people
• coronavirus resources for children and young people.

The team will be adding further sections with resources for different patient groups and updating the site as new resources are published.

We would like to ask that you promote the website through your own networks. A communications toolkit has been circulated to HEE’s stakeholders including communications colleagues in trusts, CCGs, and ICS/STPs requesting that they promote the website through their channels to those working on the front line, and the organisations and agencies with whom they work locally, to the benefit of patients and the public. It is expected that staff in across health, social care and the third sector will find this content useful. To view the communications toolkit, click here using the password LKSResources.

If there are other strands of public and patient information about COVID-19 that you would like to see covered, please forward your suggestions to KFH.England@hee.nhs.uk. 

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

HEE elearning for healthcare (elfh) – COVID-19 elearning programme –

The elfh programme is still be used by lots of the health and care workforce and has now seen more than 1,200,000 session launches. The elfh team is continuing to add new content to the programme based on the needs of the workforce responding to the pandemic.

A new learning path called “Physical Healthcare for Staff in Mental Health Settings” is now available.  The learning path includes the following content:

• Health and Social Care Interventions: Children and Young People
• Health and Social Care Interventions: Adults
• Learning Disabilities and Physical Health and can be accessed here

A second learning path for staff working in primary care and community settings called “Supporting Patient Mental Health for the whole workforce” is now available.  The learning path includes resources for those supporting adults and children with learning disabilities and can be viewed here

A learning path aimed at nurses, midwives and AHPs – but is also relevant for other members of the workforce with a supervisory role – is also now available.  The “Support for Supervisors” learning path includes resources to guide supervisors on how to provide effective feedback and support those who are being supervised.  The resources can be accessed here

For more information about the elfh COVID-19 programme select here.

elearning sessions for radiographers, radiologists and breast clinicians now live – The National Breast Imaging Academy (NBIA) project is a collaborative, national, multidisciplinary initiative which encompasses a range of solutions to address the workforce shortage in breast imaging services.  These solutions include the establishment of a national centre of excellence for training, an innovative, online technology-enhanced learning platform, the NBIA Online and the development of high-quality training programmes for radiographers, radiologists and breast clinicians.

Due to the current pressures on the health and care workforce responding to Coronavirus (COVID-19) the NBIA team recognises the impact this is having on trainees and face to face learning.  Therefore, in response to this challenge the NBIA team has worked with elfh and accelerated the launch of some of the elearning sessions to support the learning for radiographers, radiologists and breast clinicians.

For more information about the sessions, including details on how to access the NBIA elearning programme, please click 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.