The Partnership’s Personalised Care Programme secured funding from NHS England to deliver an online training programme with follow-up support for its health and care workforce, volunteers and link workers.
The training programme was developed and delivered at West Yorkshire level to maximise economy of scale, bring flexibility in training delivery and support the needs of the workforce across all of our localities. It aims to develop a resilient, skilled personalised care workforce that can address inequalities and the needs of our most vulnerable communities across West Yorkshire.
Adult social care, community services, primary care and hospital care are all covered in the training which focusses on taking a holistic approach to people’s health and wellbeing. Emphasis is placed on the importance of being able to give people time to talk about what matters most to them. The range of modules included in the training also provides an opportunity for this dedicated workforce to gain key skills.
In 2020/21, the training programme reached over 450 health, social care and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) staff and volunteers. The learning from this process has been used to inform the development of a training programme for 2021/22 to reach an additional 1,000 health, social care and VCSE staff and volunteers.
The training is bringing about transformation and change across our workforce by enabling participants to gain key skills. These skills include health coaching, active signposting, supervision, leadership, case conferencing and multi-disciplinary team (MDT) working, ultimately supporting a change in the relationship between professionals and people.
In addition, the training is supporting the resilience of the workforce in these challenging times by providing wellbeing and resilience training alongside advance care planning and professional coaching training focused on having difficult conversations related to end of life, bereavement and trauma.
People across West Yorkshire who have an interest in personalised care and who have completed the programme have now joined the ‘connecting communities network’ which is supporting those who have completed or are due to undertake the training. This peer support is helping to share learning and facilitate change across the region, to make sure that personalised care is business as usual.