Growing our own workforce
The apprenticeship solution has enabled us to offer roles to people so they can earn as they learn. This also really helps to support our core value of community. People in Norfolk can begin and progress their career locally. We undertook a successful and targeted apprentice recruitment campaign which resulted in: 599 applicants 235 shortlisted candidates 122 interviews
We recruited:
22 HCA apprentices 22 Assistant Practitioners 40 Trainee Nurse Associates
23 Nursing Degree Apprentices (2 year) 25 Nursing Degree Apprentices (4 year)
This year we embarked on our most ambitious recruitment of apprentices as we committed to growing our own workforce. Being able to help more people begin and progress steadily through their NHS career will help us to ensure our clinical vacancies are filled and that we can continue providing the crucial community health and care our communities rely on and deserve. Like all other NHS Trusts, we are finding it hard to fill our clinical vacancies. We looked at how many registered staff we would need in five years’ time and compared that to the numbers we thought we might have if we did nothing. This gap determined how many apprentices we would need, on which pathways, and when they would need to start. At the same time, services were developing Workforce Transition Plans which showed how they planned to sustain their service in the future. Apprenticeship roles needed to be heavily built into these plans to allow us to grow and train our future workforce to achieve the required staffing levels in order to deliver excellent patient care.
The facts are simple:
Norfolk is a big county – the fourth largest in the UK and NCH&C teams operate out of 76 different sites across this huge patch. That’s a lot of nurses , therapists and other registered professionals needed in lots of fragmented locations.
What next? We have a waiting list for the next cohort of apprentices and we will begin the next round of recruitment in the coming months. We have also added further apprenticeships to our offering. We were so pleased that the first cohort of Nursing Degree Apprentices officially completed their apprenticeships on 1st June 2020 and all five are now working across NCH&C as Registered Nurses. They are all also being supported with their preceptorship period. It is hoped that the first Trainee Nursing Associates cohort will finish by January at the very latest and they too will then be placed in their guaranteed jobs at NCH&C.
• We have an ageing workforce and there is a lack of qualified nurses in Norfolk. The local health and social care system as a whole isn’t attracting enough new nurses into the county and so there is a diminishing number of nurses to go round all the posts in Norfolk.
The success of the ‘Growing our own workforce’ programme has absolutely been down to team work and tenacity. Many different departments have been involved in ensuring that NCH&C could roll out such an aspiring programme. The Clinical Education team plays a key role in supporting apprentices with clinical skills. The Talent For Care team has worked tirelessly to promote the apprenticeships and worked with the recruitment team to recruit to the roles, explaining the different careers options to internal and external candidates. They are also there to make sure apprentices are supported as they progress. A key part of the apprentice experience is the support that they receive from their locality line manager – they really have been pivotal in this programme.
The academic averages in Norfolk are below national standards.
NCH&C ANNUAL SUMMARY 2019-20 27 NCH&C A NUAL SU MARY 2019-20
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