Bridgewater Community NHS Trust
Sarah Power, Careers and Apprenticeships Lead
CREATING CAREER PATHWAYS WITH DEGREE APPRENTICESHIPS
Meet Sarah Power, a Careers and Apprenticeships Lead at Bridgewater Community NHS Trust, a leading provider of community health services in the North West of England. Having personally experienced the Degree Apprenticeship pathway, Sarah shared with us how apprenticeships benefit the trust, helping to retain internal talent and close skills gaps.
USING APPRENTICESHIPS FOR POST-REGISTRATION CLINICAL QUALIFICATIONS
As an organisation who have always annually accessed post-registration specialist training provision to upskill and staff our commissioned District Nursing, School Nursing and Health Visiting services, the transition to using the apprenticeship pathway has provided a more structured and contemporary experience for those undertaking and supporting the apprenticeships.
Our recent experience of being involved in the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s revalidation of Manchester Met’s programmes has been excellent. Manchester Met’s ethos and approach has always been to ask us what we need, and to respond to our feedback on an ongoing basis. Having that level of consultation and involvement has meant that we’re not just sending our staff on a programme, so they’ve got the qualification we need to tick that box and put them in that role. Instead, we’re sending them on a programme that we’ve contributed to the principles of and are invested in. It’s this engagement that makes degree apprenticeships different and will continue to mean that we have a deeper understanding of the training that apprentices are receiving and the skills and behaviours that they’re bringing back to meet the needs of our service users.
HOW APPRENTICESHIPS ARE BENEFITTING THE ORGANISATION
By their nature, degree apprenticeships give learners a better experience than standalone education programmes, because of the support structures and accountability in place. It gives a little bit more assurance to learners and it makes conversations about development needs easier. Apprenticeship pathways have provided us as an organisation with a framework to follow, and it means that there is a commitment from both the apprentice and from us in facilitating that learning.
Our first port of call now, is always to look if there’s a way to support our workforce through an apprenticeship pathway.
PROJECT IMPACT
The Empowerment Project is a great example of our clinicians making a real impact through their degree apprenticeships. The project requires them to recognise a need and gives them the tools to go out and network with the right people to discover how to bring that to life - it can be simple, but effective. For example, there was one project which added a QR code to District Nurse’s lanyards to allow staff to quickly access policies in the community. The Empowerment Project gives the apprentices the tools to grow as clinicians and the headspace to think, “How do we make this better?”.
The ability to make that difference to their working lives and the lives of their patients and colleagues is where we get our return on investment, and it’s creating a fantastic culture of lifelong learning within our Trust.
ADDRESSING SKILLS GAPS AND SUPPORTING RETENTION
Our biggest opportunity to demonstrate impact is the use of apprenticeships to upskill existing non-clinical staff to open up career pathways to them that would otherwise have been unattainable. At a certain level, no matter how much experience an employee has, they hit a ceiling requiring a university degree to progress upwards. So the challenge becomes; how do we create equity of opportunity for staff who may have joined the workforce early without prior access to higher education, and who now have commitments (a family, a mortgage etc) which mean they can’t take on additional study or the burden of debt? Apprenticeships are the only viable way of helping those people get over that barrier.
We are creating career pathways to retain and retrain staff which never existed before. Not only does this motivate and engage staff, but it stops us as an organisation from wasting the talent that we have in our support services, and to instead tap into their potential. None of this would have been possible without the range of degree apprenticeships available to us.