As the implementation of the Leitch Review's recommendations begins to gather pace, John Rogers, Chief Executive of Skills for Health, gives us an update on how the organisation has been responding to its challenges and outlines his vision for the future.
Skills for Health is entering a critical new phase as it prepares for the next financial year and with it the arrival of the new Commission for Employment and Skills. A fully integrated approach to the UK’s education and skills system is a major step forward and the Commission will be central to this.
The Leitch Report recommendations reposition and reinforce the role of Sector Skills Councils. They have been taken up by each of the four UK Government departments responsible for skills in different ways. The resulting challenge facing Skills for Health is to ensure that healthcare employers and other partners recognise this step change and use it to their advantage - influencing future education and training provision and developing a consistent approach to identifying and addressing skills needs.
Working in partnership with employers is at the heart of Leitch. Many of you will be aware that, in close consultation with healthcare sector employers, Skills for Health has created a range of tools to help employers measure what skills they have and identify those they need. These include:
Although the ongoing development of these tools, frameworks and competences remains important, to respond most effectively to Leitch we now need to move from creating the infrastructure to enabling implementation; making sure that these free-to-access and nationally recognised tools are widely used and provide real benefit to healthcare employers.
But this is easier said than done. For example, much time and energy is still spent on developing 'local' competences. Sometimes this is because local employers feel that they need to produce something specific for themselves, but many employers are still simply unaware that national competences are freely available to them to use in different ways. Local competences often offer an easy and quick 'short-term fix', but they severely limit transferability of skills and fail to link to mainstream qualifications and career frameworks. The national competences allow local flexibility whilst enabling local employers to determine how best to use them to enhance the skills and qualifications of their workforce.
The best way to gain optimum benefit from using competences across the healthcare sector is for employers to use the same national competences so that skills can be easily identified across job roles, departments, healthcare providers and in the nations and regions of the UK.
This allows local flexibility by enabling employers to apply the competences in ways that meet their local needs, but also enables transferability between organisations. This is good for individual progression and resource saving for healthcare employers. Importantly, it will make a significant contribution to delivery of the Leitch vision of a demand driven skills system and an effective, patient-led healthcare sector.
