Supporting health and social care

Supporting health and social care

Early in the pandemic, it became clear that the country needed as many health and social care workers as it could muster.

So when COVID-19 reached a critical stage within Scotland and the UK, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) published emergency standards for nursing and midwifery education that would enable non-supernumerary placements for pre-registration nursing and midwifery students to support the workforce at this time.

In Scotland, all year 2, 3 and 4 nursing and midwifery students were invited by Scotland’s Chief Nursing Officer to take up the offer of paid placements and on the 7th of April large numbers began taking up non-supernumerary placements. By the beginning of June there were 4839 pre-registration nurses and midwives in practice. This included 4209 student nurses (from all four fields of practice) and 341 student midwives in NHS placements and just over 300 student nurses in non-NHS settings such as care homes, GP practices and hospices across Scotland. NES also became the employer of all the students who were placed in these non-NHS areas.

All this was achieved at speed through partnership working, both at a strategic and operation level, with universities and practice partners, ensuring students were valued as part of the workforce whilst being engaged in meaningful learning experiences.

Practice education and care home education facilitators, who are part of the NMAHP Practice Education Network, have been integral in supporting staff to ensure students continued to receive supervision and assessment in line with NMC regulatory standards while on paid placements. This supported students in the achievement of learning outcomes to enable them to progress to the next part of their programmes or for those students in year 3 and 4 to enable them to graduate and register with the NMC. Students have continued their paid placements throughout the summer with year 2 students completing at the end of August and Year 3 and 4 students completing at the end of September.

Planning for the future

Through this time, COVID-19 has had a huge impact on all health professions’ practice learning experiences and availability of placements. This disruption is likely to result in a backlog of health and care students waiting to complete placements and therefore complete education programmes. This ultimately may have an impact on the health and care workforce due to a disrupted supply of newly qualified practitioners.

To help address these issues, the Scottish Government commissioned NES to produce a report into the Provision of NMAHP Placements in the 2020/21 Academic Session. This explored the legacy of disruption, and how to mitigate against these.

Some of the response has already started, including developing national guiding principles for:

• virtual placements using “near me” technology
• COVID-19 occupational risk assessment processes
• pre-practice training and practice skills requirements.

We have been working in partnership with stakeholders from universities and practice, to plan the recovery of supernumerary placements, prioritising students whose practice learning experiences (PLE) were disrupted due to COVID-19.

Response and Recovery: the AHP Webinar series

Supporting a diverse workforce, at scale, to ensure service continuity, was critical during the pandemic. One example of how we responded was the work of our Allied Health Professions’ (AHP) Team, ensuring staff were ready and able to deliver their services in different ways, by offering a series of webinars.

Initially, the focus was on improving confidence of staff in the use of digital technologies to deliver core services, including the use of NHS Near Me, MS Teams and delivering virtual patient groups. These sessions offered an opportunity for NES to collaborate with partner organisations and clinicians to share stories of good practice, practical help and guidance, and signposting to resources.

The Team subsequently delivered a range of webinars, including:

• A focus on AHPs working in dementia and learning disabilities
• Multi-disciplinary webinars for those supporting children and young people and their families
• Supporting staff wellbeing
• Assisting the recovery of AHP practice-based learning experiences for students
• Identifying and supporting young carers

Webinars proved to be successful, popular and easily accessed as a means of providing a quality learning experience to large numbers. Since the beginning of April 2020, the webinars have had a total reach of 13,800 attendees (which does not include where additional staff attended as part of a team) and over 9,300 views of the recorded sessions.

As we move forward, the Team will use the findings of the AHP Listening exercise and the key areas identified in the Framework for Supporting People through Recovery and Rehabilitation during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic to provide the focus for the webinars we will deliver over the coming months.

Response and Recovery: Maternity

Another example of how we responded was the work of the Scottish Multiprofessional Maternity Development Programme (SMMDP) team. We provide a range of affordable evidence-based courses and supportive materials to suit all healthcare practitioners who provide maternity care in Scotland.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic all of our courses were put on hold, but gradually over the past few months we have been able to re-start some of them. Initially, the SMMDP team facilitated a number of courses within the central belt and have been fortunate to be able to run some of these out of NHS Louisa Jordan National Skills Education Hub.

At the end of June, the team had a request to provide a Scottish Routine Examination of the Newborn course (SRENC) for midwives working in NHS Shetland. As travel restrictions were still in place, the team needed to think how this could be provided virtually and it was decided that we would use the virtual platform GoToTraining which is a web-hosted online training service. Candidates were also invited to participate from NHS Orkney and NHS Highland.

The candidates were provided with a number of pre-course lectures so that the two days could focus on the practical element of the newborn examination.

Overall this virtual SRENC was a success but running it remotely over two days brought its own challenges: both technical and in terms of being physically demanding on the instructors.

While we can see the majority of our courses remaining face to face wherever possible, this virtual course meant that 11 midwives were able to undertake important training at a time when travel was not possible.

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