Health Education England (HEE) have released their business plan for 2020/2021, detailing how they will support the NHS in the current climate, and going forward. The plan focusses on how HEE will approach the challenges in the NHS – set out in the Long-Term Plan, and the People Plan – as well as tackling the impact of Covid-19.
Another key aspect of the plan is how HEE will continue to oversee the undergraduate and postgraduate health education, and deliver training for around 240,000 students and trainees.
The plan outlines three core long-term goals, driven by the current objectives and priorities in the NHS:
Future Workforce – Reforming clinical education in order to produce high quality clinical professionals. HEE aim to deliver as many as 50,000 extra nurses by 2024, increase the number of GP training places to 4,000, as well as closing the gap regarding health inequalities by widening access to health careers.
Current Workforce – Ensuring the workforce is a co-operative, flexible, multi-professional, digitally enabled system. Support will be given to expand and develop the multi-disciplinary teams in primary care, and expand the advanced practice programme.
Quality – Maintaining quality education and rigorous training that will be delivered with partners. Healthcare learners will be listened to by HEE, so that long-term improvements can be made to education and training.
Dr Navina Evans, Chief Executive of HEE, said: “We are pleased to publish our business plan which sets out our aims for the coming year. We have refreshed our organisational goals to be more ambitious, strategic and challenging and to respond to the needs of the NHS which have been impacted by coronavirus in many ways.
“Over the past year, we have all needed to be agile, innovative, and cooperative. Now we must refocus and recover by learning lessons, supporting our people, and working together.
“In our case, continuing to support the NHS; helping learners deal with the mental and physical aftermath; and securing the future progress of qualified clinicians with as little delay as possible.”
Read the HEE Business Plan here: www.hee.nhs.uk/about/work-us/recovery-delivery-hee-business-plan-202122
You can also read HEE's latest Mandate from the Government here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-education-england-mandate-2021-to-2022
