How to upskill your workforce

Upskilling the existing healthcare workforce is a way to improve services and enhance career progression, writes Tess Green

At Skills for Health, we are working with employers across the healthcare sector, showing how using a competence-based approach to learning and training can help solve employers' workforce development needs.

Skills for Health and the Department of Health have developed six demonstrator sites in England to show how the products and services we are developing can be used to support healthcare organisations where staff development is a priority.

One of these sites is at the North West London Hospitals trust, where healthcare assistants can upskill to associate practitioner level, thanks to an in-house training package based on competencies.

The aim of the project was to develop practitioners who could apply their knowledge and skills to improve the patient's journey and reduce the length of their hospital stay. The work offered an opportunity for healthcare assistants to extend their scope of responsibility and practise beyond their current role. Nine healthcare assistants have been working through a tailored competencies package, with support from mentors and managers, across clinical areas including accident and emergency, theatres and admissions, urology investigation and the stroke rehabilitation unit.

The work will put the newly qualified associate practitioners on a career pathway for further progression, up to foundation degree level, and facilitate succession planning for other healthcare support workers.

Great opportunity

Another demonstrator site at Berkshire Healthcare foundation trust has seen managers using a competence-based approach to role design in support of its Hospitals at Night programme.

Following analysis of junior doctors' out-of-hours workload, trust managers realised services could be provided in a more cost-effective way. They decided to address this by exploring the need for more practitioner-grade staff in line with nursing strategy and clinical governance.

Creating a new role - advanced level practitioner - was part of the solution. These staff members will assume many roles previously carried out by other staff, such as doing routine tests, hence simplifying patient pathways.

Managers at the trust identified which competencies the advanced level practitioners would need to work safely and effectively. These were then matched, where possible, against national occupational standards and managers searched the Skills for Health online competence database and identified those required for the role.

There is great opportunity for health professionals - including nurses, occupational therapists, psychologists and social workers - to progress into the new role. Training would need to be tailored for each of these groups, to plug any skills gaps and complement existing knowledge.

Skills for Health sees examples such as these as clear evidence of the many benefits to healthcare managers of using a competence-based approach to the design and re-design of roles and services.

To find out more about the Skills for Health online database, which features 2,000+ competencies and a range of easy to use workforce planning tools, visit www.skillsforhealth.org.uk