Health Education England quality award shows NSFT’s work experience is gold standard
NSFT’s Talent for Care team has received a gold quality award for the standard of work experience it offers, opening doors to future employment and apprenticeships.
The award of the gold standard was made by Health Education England (HEE) and will last for two years.
HEE’s Work Experience Quality Standard has been created to help healthcare organisations to quality assure their work experience placements. Organisations must demonstrate how the placements they offer are planned, delivered and evaluated.
It also aims to ensure that learners are not disadvantaged because of their geographical location or organisational interpretation of work experience.
Career facilitator at NSFT, Elisha Gladwell said: “Before the award was achieved the NSFT work experience offer was extremely limited. In fact, we didn’t offer any placements during covid, just virtual ones twice a year. Now we have had more than 40 applications already this year.”
The trust now runs a work experience induction, has implemented a work experience workbook, offers peer support while on placement and follows up with students post placement to keep engagement until they leave school /college.
“Work experience is a crucial tool in developing our future workforce, “said Elisha. “We focus on the growth of the workforce through pre-employment engagement to attract the next generation of workers. It can provide an individual with ‘real life’ experience, an introduction to a working environment, opportunity to improve key skills/personal development and employability and an insight to the variety of careers in the NHS and NSFT.”
The quality standard criteria are broken down into six sections and each has multiple points that need to be adhered to and evidenced in order to achieve the quality standard.
Elisha said: “It was a huge task to collate all the evidence required to meet the criteria. Initially NHS England request a minimum of 12 pieces of evidence for the gold standard. I submitted over 50 documents for review to demonstrate our work and the work we have done with our work experience students.”
She said the team was “unbelievably proud” of achieving the award. And she added: “The generosity of our colleagues across the Trust to host and support our work experiencers has been golden.”
Chief people officer and deputy CEO at NSFT Cath Byford said: “This is a great achievement for the Talent for Care team. Work experience is an excellent way of introducing young people to the idea of working for the NHS and helps build for our future.”