Comment

The best and the brightest

The NHS Transformation Unit (TU) is continuing in its quest to attract the best and the brightest to a career in the public service, writes Jon Caswell.

Last month saw the second group of graduate trainees join the TU team to support the long-term development of the organisation. It’s a reflection of the TU’s ambition to identify, develop and retain talent and secure the future pipeline of NHS leadership. 

In a recent NHE article, deputy chief executive Alex Heritage wrote of the challenge for the NHS to recruit the right people from a variety of backgrounds and, once recruited, to ensure more effort is spent on creating a vision and culture that focuses on developing their abilities and skills.

Given that the TU is a specialist and unique organisation within the NHS, it has needed to develop its own, yet highly-complimentary, graduate training scheme to fill the areas not covered by the scheme offered by the NHS itself.

The TU’s bespoke and fully-resourced training programmes are aimed at graduates with an interest in pursuing a career in the NHS and that are applying within five years of leaving university. Lasting for 18 months, they provide a rare opportunity to develop highly valued skills. The training is a mix of in-house development, on-the-job training and mentoring, as well as formal academic and commercial training.  Initially the graduate positions were for trainee data analysts, who also received training from the NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit, but this has now been expanded to offer project management training.

Katy Coope, head of organisational strategy at the TU, said: “There is a limited number of places on the NHS graduate scheme and they are quite prescriptive fields. Our graduate roles are specialist disciplines not fully developed in the current system, but very much highly sought-after. There are similarities, of course; the chance to work in different areas and a heavily invested programme of support and training.”

The TU management team worked with the NHS Strategy Unit, having recognised there were gaps.

Steven Wyatt, head of strategic analytics, said: “The health service is increasingly recognising the role that good data analysis plays in improving patient care. But demand for experienced data scientists is fierce. The NHS needs to take a lead in developing the analysts of the future with a strong understanding of the health sector and the unique challenges it faces.”

Following the initial phase, which saw the recruitment of Durham University graduate Katie Noon and Cambridge University graduate Michael Cheng (pictured), the latest process has seen Charlotte Griffiths and Audrey Abbot becoming trainee project managers and Debbie McGovern, Ronan Machin and Patrick Hutchinson as trainee analysts. What unites them is a desire to work in the public sector and to help improve standards in the NHS.

Griffiths applied for both the TU and the wider graduate scheme, but it was the TU that ultimately interested her more: “The uniqueness of the TU as an organisation, evoking change on a mass scale, from inside out, was something I hadn’t heard of before and this really appealed to me.”

For Noon and Cheng, the experience has proved to be exhilarating and rewarding. “Thanks to the TU scheme, I have the knowledge and skills to take on varied work, as well as the mindset to ask the right questions and turn complex problems to something more easily understood. I’ve gone from ‘how could I do this?’ to ‘how should I do this?’” Cheng said.

Both are now offering their support to the new intake, having become part of a culture that is passionate about developing the next generation of leaders and creating a sustainable talent pool for the NHS.

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