Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy

Health Education England has published a General Practice Nursing, Workforce Development plan - to read it click here for the link. The report has been written by a HEE Task and Finish group chaired by Dr Peter Lane, who is a GP in Barnsley and the lead behind the Yorkshire and Humber Advanced Training Practice Initiative. The report looks at four key issues: Entry into general practice – raising the profile as a first career choice and increasing the availability of training placements for students Establishing the role of the GP Nurse – ensuring appropriate training and support is available for new GPNs   Enhancing the role with professional development and career progression Expanding the healthcare support workforce with standardised training and career paths. We have been reviewing the recommendation of the report and looking at how the work of the Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy is addressing these recommendations and then RAG rating ourselve...

As part of the General Practice Forward View (GPFV) commitment to strengthen general practice workforce The Academy is supporting practices to make a proposal to become part of the International GP Recruitment Programme. Overseas GPs recruited as part of the programme will be supported with a dedicated training programme about general practice in England. Support will be provided to help with language requirements and meeting the standards of the national Induction and Refresher (I&R) Scheme. GPs recruited as part of the scheme will get funding similar to those on the Induction and Refresher scheme. The funding is £3,500 per month whilst on the scheme, £1,250 contribution towards the cost of indemnity and £425 for reimbursement of GMC registration fees. Practices need to be GP training practices or to be partnered with a GP training practice. Practices on the scheme will be offering attractive and competitive salaries and the schemes will be offering help with relocation fo...

We are really pleased to announce that Janice Dean has joined the Academy as our Academy Co-ordinator. Janice is on secondment from Wakefield CCG. We have proper accommodation at Kings Medical Centre, Normanton - an office, meeting room and usual office 'stuff'. Janice has a desk and here she is settling in! Janice is the go-to person for the Academy. We are currently acquiring an Academy generic email address that Janice will access and distribute but in the meantime you can ring her on 01924 228092 or contact her on her Wakefield email address - janice.dean@wakefieldccg.nhs.uk .

The latest quarterly survey of general practice staff in practices across Yorkshire and Humber was published last week. There were several themes from the data: The number of practices continues to reduce with mergers and consolidation of practices. In the last quarter the number of practices again reduced from 765 to 757 The affect of initiatives to encourage newly qualified nurses to have a career in general practice can be seen with 12% of GP nurses under 34 years of age The number of GPs under 34 has reduced from 23% to 20%. This might because newly qualified GPs are not taking up posts locally. It raises the interesting questions about where they actually are going? The report also shows the continued huge inter practice variation. Of 136 practices that commented about their risks and mitigation's only one practice said it had no workforce risks. The risks could be summarises under the following headings: Recruitment / retention /retirement Workload Resource co...

The government this week announced a £1.3bn plan to expand mental health services that include details to expand the mental health workforce by 21,000 posts including 4,600 nurses working in crisis care, 2,000 additional nurses, consultants and therapists posts in children's and adolescent mental health services and an extra 2,900 therapists and other therapists to support expanded access to adult talking therapies. When questioned by the BBC about these plans Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, invited people to look at the governments track record. He claimed that there are '6,000 more people in nursing'. According to NHS Digital the numbers of nurses and health visitors in the NHS has gone up from 280.950 in May 2010 to 285,893 in March 2017. That's 5,057 rather than 6,000. But not all of this increase is in mental health nurses. Full Fact has checked out the number of mental health nurses and the number of mental health nurses has actually fallen by ne...