OUR PROGRAMMES
Leadership programme: Widening access to healthcare support worker roles
Suitable for small teams of senior leaders in NHS trusts, including operational managers, EDI leads, and HR leads
About the programme
This bespoke programme, originally commissioned by NHS England, is designed to help you develop a more diverse workforce of healthcare support workers (HCSW) that meets the needs of your organisation, while applying learning about how to lead system change. We encourage trusts to send small teams of senior leaders to attend the programme together, including operational managers, equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) leads, and human resources (HR) leads.
“Being part of the Altogether Better programme has been energising and empowering for us, we have had an opportunity to analyse our recruitment offer for our HCSWs and look at bias within the processes. This could potentially be scaled up across our organisation. We have scrutinised our data, reviewed our recruitment pathways, removed barriers and highlighted the broad range of opportunities within our workforce for underrepresented groups in our local community.”
The challenges
Healthcare support workers are a vital part of the healthcare team, providing essential, high quality and compassionate care to patients across all care settings. With services under stress, we need to recruit, retain and develop the right people in these roles.
Across the country NHS trusts face critical workforce shortages and there are currently around 17,000 healthcare support worker vacancies in England at any one time. Trusts also report difficulties onboarding and retaining new recruits.
NHS organisations often aren’t very good at attracting or retaining staff from diverse communities – meaning staff do not always reflect the communities they serve. Those from black and minority ethnic groups who do work for the NHS and are more likely to experience harassment from both patients and colleagues, and find it harder to progress in their careers. Much of this is due to the unconscious bias and institutional racism that’s built into the workings of organisations.
These challenges directly impact on how people can access and develop careers in the NHS, and in turn the quality of care we provide to patients and communities.
Drawing on international best practice, insights from successful trusts and our comprehensive survey of over 1,400 HCSWs this programme offers frameworks, tools and practical support to address these challenges.
Building a strong compassionate workforce of the future
If we can recruit diverse and compassionate people, who exemplify the skills and core values needed to be excellent healthcare support workers, everyone benefits.
If we nurture, retain and develop our teams, some of these people could also be supported to go on to become the nurses, nursing associates and midwives of the future. In our survey of healthcare support workers we discovered close to 30% had degrees and most were actively interested in career development.
“We are thrilled to be welcoming people from all different walks of life into the NHS. A healthcare support worker can be the perfect entry point to the NHS, they are an essential part of a healthcare team and are at the very heart of patient care.”
Our programme recognises that there are already many examples of good practice and islands of excellence in trusts around the country. We build on this throughout the programme, bringing in ideas, experiences and innovation from other sectors and finding new ground to work systemically to address the challenge.
Whilst focusing on HCSWs, the programme learning and tools can be applied to every role in the trust, allowing organisations to address systemic biases in recruitment, retention and promotion.
We are all aware that there are significant societal biases at play in recruitment and promotion. Evidence shows that female doctors earn around 17% less than male doctors, and people from ethnic minorities experience higher rates of rejection in interviews.
We explicitly address the drivers of systemic bias behind these statistics – building understanding of internalised, interpersonal, institutional and ideological bias through every element of the programme.
How is the programme delivered?
Delivered over 11 months, this programme is made up of a mix of full-day face to face workshops, and half day online sessions. It also includes:
Development of a community of practice
Individual one-to-one support for organisations
Themed drop in sessions around particular priorities
This programme combines ideas, practices, tools to lead system change, and support to deliver a more diverse workforce. We explore the systemic biases in who we recruit, support, make welcome and promote within organisations. The programme sets out to make a difference and use the learning to deliver a more diverse healthcare support worker workforce that meets the needs of your organisation.
Our workshop modules are designed to take participants through an end-to-end process, starting with understanding local demographic data and how to reach and engage with the right people. We then look at all elements of the recruitment and retention process:
Reviewing job descriptions and person specifications for bias
Practical tools for value-based recruitment
Evidence based approaches to selecting/interviewing
Onboarding and induction
Personal and professional development
Retention and advancement.
Facilitators and guest speakers will share exciting and challenging ideas and bring in expertise and innovation from outside the NHS. This will explore new ways to work systemically to address the challenges of widening access. We also bring in the voices and wisdom of Healthcare Support Workers themselves (including findings from a survey of 1,400 HCSWs), giving insight into what why they join, the challenges they faced in entering the workforce, and what matters most to them.
Who is the programme for?
This programme is for senior leaders in trusts who are curious and want to learn together to make changes in the system that will make a real difference.
As you know well, good intentions are not enough, and we want to work with trusts who are serious about doing things differently and whose executive leaders are willing to support this.
We encourage trusts to send small teams who include:
“We have had an opportunity to review our training and development offer which is a key part of our strategy to grow our own future workforce, act as an anchor organisation, create good employment and training opportunities for the local population which supports the widening participation agenda and our ambition to address health inequalities.”
an operational manager who wants to develop their HCSW workforce
an equality, diversity & inclusion lead
a human resources lead.
This programme can be commissioned at area level, inviting multiple trusts to send participants to work as part of a wider community of practice, or bespoke programmes can be delivered at trust level.
Programme facilitators
The Altogether Better team works with people in health and care across the UK to develop new ways of organising that support the health system to be fit for the future. Find out more about the lead facilitators: Martin Fischer and Alyson McGregor.
Take the next step
If you’d like to chat to us about running the programme for your organisation or in your locality/region, drop us a line, we’d be happy to chat about your requirements and design a bespoke programme for your team.
How to join
This programme can be commissioned at area level, inviting multiple trusts to send participants to work as part of a wider community of practice, or bespoke programmes can be delivered at trust level.