Independent healthcare practitioner Hywel Griffiths used Skills for Health competences to underpin the franchise system he was developing.
Hywel, who has been working as a private practitioner for 10 years and counts the Welsh Rugby Union as a client, spent 18 months developing Therapyworks.
He knew his franchisees would not necessarily have had any previous business skills training and he therefore wanted to provide them with a system that incorporated clinical and good business practice. Hywel explains: "Managing a business is not something healthcare professionals necessarily get training in so I want to provide franchisees with an ‘operating manual', interlinked with competences, so they can focus on clinical care with minimum hassle on the business side. I wanted to offer a system similar to the NHS knowledge and skills framework that independent practitioners could operate within."
Part of Therapywork's support package is a competence based ‘three cog' system, which aligns the governance of the franchise, the operation of the practice and individual development. Skills for Health and Hywel worked together to identify the most appropriate competences to underpin the cogs, using Skills for Health's own web-based competence database, along with the Skills for Business network database of National Occupational Standards, which includes competences developed by all sector skills councils and standard setting bodies.
"From all the skill sets required to run a business, we narrowed it down to what is most relevant to independent practitioners," says Hywel.
Skills for Health are now working with Hywel to electronically integrate the identified competences into the three cog system so that Therapyworks, and its franchisees, can access the relevant competences easily.
Helping Hywel embed competences throughout his business model, incorporating CPD, workforce, business and management development, proved a valuable exercise for Skills for Health. Undertaking this mapping has helped to inform both the development, and applicability of Skills for Health's products and solutions for micro and small businesses.
"Skills for Health have been fantastic, very supportive. They have enabled me to develop a complete competence matrix for all the services I need in private practice, like dealing with payments, even competences for things like reception work."
Hywel Griffiths, Therapyworks
Skills for Health is working with a wide range of partners in the independent sector to trial our workforce development tools and competences. Our focus is on supporting healthcare organisations to redesign roles and teams to underpin new services and improve services for patients and service users.
Our national competences were used by Clinovia, a member of the BUPA group, to support staff development. With Clinovia we looked at improving education, training and service redesign in a newly acquired phlebotomy service.
Using our online database Clinovia benchmarked skills against competences and then developed a standardised education and training programme for all practitioners who take blood including registered nurses and new phlebotomists. The competences also provide learning outcomes and a framework of assessment across the patient pathways.
At the Nuffield Hospital in Guildford managers decided to explore whether a competence based approach could be used to support staff development. Their first priority was to improve the use of syringe pumps and reduce errors in their set up, monitoring and dismantling. Using the Skills for Health online database, managers identified three competences relating to syringe drivers and used these to develop a training package for all their nurses.
They then turned their attention to work-around labelling of specimens. Using a similar approach they identified relevant competences and devised an in-house training programme.
These early successes then encouraged them to look at how this approach could be used to improve the transfer system for patients being taken from the theatre to the ward. A competence based approach was used to develop a training package which was then delivered to a level 3 NVQ Healthcare Assistant. This enabled her to develop her skills and contribute towards an enhanced patient service.
