27.08.20
HEE announces £15m funding boost for expanding clinical placements
Health Education England (HEE) has announced a new £15m funding boost which has been made available through its Clinical Placement Expansion Programme (CPEP) to increase the number of clinical placements available in the NHS.
The new funding will help support growth in nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy and all other allied health professions.
It represents a 50% increase in the funding previously pledged and will be broken down accordingly:
- £8.2m towards an additional 7,000 nursing and midwifery clinical placements across all regions and
- £5.8m towards an additional 3,800 allied health profession placements concentrating on the prioritised areas such as placement education facilitators with a further £1m of that investment focused on sustainable technologies.
Serving as additional investment, the funding has also been targeted to support the expansion across all health professions undergraduate programmes this September. Additional funding is also be provided by the Department of Health and Social Care to support lifting the cap on medicine and dentistry courses.
The Department of Education has also outlined additional funds being made available through its teaching grant to support the increased capacity. It is expected that this funding will be used to prioritise high-cost subjects such as medicine, dentistry, nursing and other healthcare disciplines, alongside laboratory-based courses.
READ MORE: HEE to invest £10m to expand the NHS & care workforce
Interim Chief Executive of Health Education England (HEE), Professor Wendy Reid, said: “These young people are the future NHS workforce and we are committed to making sure there are career paths for them all. Providing placement opportunities is a key part of this and we want to provide support for students across all professions.
“It is vital that we can increase placement capacity by developing new placement networks that make more use of primary care settings, the PIVO sector (private, independent and voluntary organisations) and technology-based placements combined with alternative models of supervision.”
Mark Radford, Chief Nurse at Health Education England, added: “The response we received from organisations expressing their desire to provide placements for more students was far greater than we had imagined so I am really pleased that further funds have been found to enable us to expand the programme.
“Placements are a key part of a student’s learning giving them the opportunity to apply the knowledge they have gained at university in learning key skills and achieve the required competences so they can eventually register in their chosen profession, and provide the best possible care for patients.”