Developing Leeds' health and care workforce together

What does your role entail, and how do you work with Leeds Beckett University’s School of Health?

My role is, primarily, to help integrate the health and care workforce across Leeds, working with NHS partners; the council; independent care providers; third sector health and care providers; and our educational bodies – the college and the universities who are educating our workforce of the future.

We support the integration of workforce, so we can work much more smoothly across organisational boundaries and train and develop as one.

We have a strategic workforce board which oversees this integration work around the health and care workforce in Leeds. Leeds Beckett, alongside the other educational institutions, is a member of that board. This board oversees what happens in the Leeds Health and Care Academy, which supports things like T-Levels, apprenticeships, CPD.

We also have a programme of collaborative workforce projects, for example introducing new roles into different healthcare settings. Leeds Beckett has been instrumental in the work around introducing occupational therapists into primary care settings. Working with an educational partner on these projects is really important, because we have to think about the pathways and education routes into those careers, CPD, supervision, and clinical placements

Leeds Beckett is a member of the Academy’s advisory group for education. We work with educational partners to ensure that we’re sharing best practice around educational methodologies, inclusive learning practices, and enhanced technology.

Dr Duncan Sharp is on the steering committee for our work in narrowing inequalities through health and care careers, which is where we engage with local communities to help people step into education and jobs in health and care. There's also a cultural project that Leeds Beckett are involved with, where the students are co-creating a working culture and making sure that we're embedding it into the learning that happens at the university, as well in placements, and their future workforce experience.

We work very closely with Leeds Beckett on clinical placements, looking at how we can be more innovative, how we can work on our strategic, longer term workforce planning as a city, and making sure that the pipeline of students is meeting future workforce needs, not just current workforce needs.

I think the relationships with our university partners is hugely important because, if we can work together on planning, rather than everyone doing their own separate activity, we'll have a much more secure pipeline for the future workforce in health and care.

Is there a particular success that you can highlight from the work you’ve done in partnership with the School of Health to date?

The vaccination program was one of the biggest successes we've had collaborating as a city. The only way we could do that was to work in partnership.

We had to work at a huge pace and we went from a situation where we might have some vaccines approved for use, to delivering these vaccines into people's arms in a matter of weeks. It was incredibly quick, and at a time when the country was in lockdown and the health and care workforce were already struggling trying to deal with the impacts of COVID-19. 

The Leeds Health and Care Academy coordinated the workforce response, and we pulled together all of the training being developed nationally, and worked with Leeds Beckett, University of Leeds and Leeds Trinity University on skills training. 

We also contacted our student body across Leeds to ask if they could step forward as a vaccinator, work in administration, or be a steward to help us run the vaccination centres. We were absolutely inundated with responses, with more than 1,400 applications from students to fill those roles. 

It was amazing, we had a really strong pipeline of students who completed training and worked with us. I think it was one of the biggest, high-impact successes for Leeds that relied on partnership working, and it meant that we could mobilize really quickly.

Another example is the narrowing inequalities through health and care careers programme. This was developed around a project run by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Leeds City Council, particularly focused on engaging the local community in Lincoln Green. Leeds Beckett evaluated that project to help us develop our learning and really understand what worked well, what the barriers were and how we could start to build that approach across the city. We’ve recently launched the third campaign, which builds on the strengths of the first two.

Having that academic evaluation and input, and help in terms of the design, is fantastic. Also, as an Anchor Institution, there was a really good synergy around being an employer and being able to do outreach and support for widening participation in education for students from local communities.

Why is this an exciting time for students to enter into a career in healthcare?

As the health and care sector becomes more integrated, what we're seeing is a huge opportunity for individuals entering into the system. 

There's so much change happening, and there's the opportunity to influence and shape that. We’re seeing developments in care, enabled by the recent advances in technology, and that’s amazing. A couple of years ago, virtual wards were few and far between – they were pilot activity. Now, we're seeing the real value of those innovative approaches.

Historically there has been quite a linear career progression. If you come in as a healthcare assistant, you might do your apprenticeship to become a nurse, and then you might go on to be a sister. But what we're seeing now is more opportunities for people to move across different parts of the sector. 

Over half of the health and care workforce in Leeds don't work in clinical frontline roles, but understanding and having experience of those roles can be really beneficial. So, the opportunities to get into clinical education, to get into projects, to get into planning – it’s vast. 

Once you're in health and care, you get to explore what different partner organisations have to offer, the different cultures, and the different settings. The link with the third sector has been amazing, and we’re seeing lots of opportunities develop through that. 

We’ve also learned so much through the pandemic, we've had to find different ways to resolve difficulties, so some positives have come out of it. That's not to say it's not been hard. It's got to be a values-based decision to come into health and care. But if it's the right fit for you, I think the opportunities are amazing.