HR director promotes 'joint training' benefits

'There is a case for more common learning, ' he told a London conference to launch the second report of the steering group for the Future Healthcare Workforce project. Its initial report caused a storm when it suggested joint training three years ago.

Co-author Margaret Conroy said a 'radical shake-up' of the way jobs were designed, and of education and training could deliver 'an impressive range of benefits for the NHS'.

Mr Taylor said the NHS Executive's review of workforce planning would be an opportunity to open up issues that had been 'ducked too long'.

'We have got to have a workforce that has specialist training and can deliver medical and clinical care in a high technology environment where clinical decisions are going to be increasingly pored over and subject to scrutiny.'

Joint training was also raised last week at a conference promoting the government's Improving Working Lives campaign.

Sue Whittaker, chair of Northgate and Prudhoe trust, pointed out that doctors, nurses and professions allied to medicine worked 'as teams throughout their working lives'.

She asked when there would be 'a national initiative to ensure that training for these three groups' took place together.

NHS chief executive Sir Alan Langlands said there needed to be a change in 'current rigid structures'. But he said the need was to bring people together in structural ways at various points in their training and development.

Earlier, Sir Alan urged managers to take seriously the fact that staff needed greater flexibility in order to balance work and home lives.

Failure to act would mean taking the consequences in terms of high staff turnover, high sick leave and staff shortages that added real costs to the service.

Sir Alan also said managers had to make sure 'the NHS provides an environment where black and ethnic minority staff feel safe, feel valued and are able to make progress on the same terms as anyone else.'