Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy

Wakefield is involved in the second wave of Nurse Associate Training. This is a new support role that will sit alongside existing healthcare support workers and fully-qualified registered nurses to deliver hands-on care for patients. The role will allow career progression and is a route to becoming a registered GP Nurse. Click here to watch a You Tube video of Olivia explaining how she got a place on the Nurse Associate pilot: Or for more details from Health Education England click here

The Academy website is due to be launched in exactly four weeks time. We would have loved to have done it earlier but the website is such a good news story that we are not allowed, due to a purdah on good news stories during the election, to launch till after the general election on 8th June. The website is starting to look great. It will include general information about the Academy, Academy staff, information about careers in general practice, vacancies in general practice in Wakefield, information about the Advanced Training Practice hub and links to resources and our events calendar. The best bit so far is probably the videos - lots of willing (?) volunteers who tell their story about their training in Wakefield. The website is being hosted by the Connecting Care Website - to follow and view as soon as we are live - click here!

As part of promoting nurses 'International Nurses Day' Last week the 12th May, I thought it was timely to give a brief description on my post that I feel very privileged to have secured, as a leadership fellow. The fellowship programme is part of the future Leaders Programme, which aims to Invest in leaders of the future. My post is part funded by Health Education England (HEE YH) and part by the CCG. This programme was initially aimed at Medics, but as of last year they opened it up to other disciplines such as  nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and other allied health professionals and practitioners. I was on the first programme that included nurses and I am seizing the opportunity to promote and champion nurses as leaders within healthcare.  Please click on the link below to access the future leaders programme for more information on the fellowship and indeed employing a fellow for any le...

Margaret McCartney in the BMJ this week had an article complaining about leaflets in the paper BMJ that advertise courses to help students get places at medical school, for a mere £500 that is! Its ironic that opposite her article there was a full colour page advert for just such a company - MediPrep! So is it a problem? Only 7% of pupils in the UK are educated privately, but they compose a quarter of medical students. The GMC commission   'Selecting for Excellence' in 2014 which examined these issues and found that 80% of all medical students in the UK came from just 20% of schools! Entry to medical school is demanding, it is important that students are selected in the fairest way possible and the GMC reported that some students, despite having the necessary aptitude to study medicine were being excluded. So, yes we do have a problem. So, Houston, what are we doing about it! A core objective of Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy is to widen access...

One of the roles for the Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy is to facilitate education and training across Wakefield for all of the Wakefield General Practice workforce. We have set up a calendar of training events. It is publicly accessible on Google calendars, its not on Skyline so you don't need any passwords or logins to access it. It is a Google calendar so you could add it to your Google login if you wanted to, but you don't need to. At the moment we just have TARGET dates for the next 12 months. And by the way wasn't the GP TARGET at Pontefract great yesterday. We certainly had a full house, can you spot yourself in the picture! To access the calendar click here  and if you have any events planned you want to add click here to email me with them.

The BMA have just announced that agreement has been reached with the Department of Health for  a new GP Retention Scheme. The scheme pays practices £76.92 per weekly session and the Retained GP a bursary of £1,000 for one to two sessions a week, £2,000 for two sessions a week and £3,000 for three sessions a week. The scheme is open to doctors who meet ALL of the following criteria: Where a doctor is leaving or has left general practice (but is still on the National Medical Performers List) due to: Personal Reasons Approaching Retirement Requires greater flexibility in order to undertake other work either within or outside of general practice AND when a regular part time role does not meeting the doctor's need for flexibility for example the requirement for short clinics or annualised hours AND where there is need for additional educational supervision. For example a newly qualified doctor needing to work 1 - 4 sessions a week due to caring responsibilities or those work...

Practices in Wakefield have been training PA's or Physicians Associates for the last couple of years. If you are interested to know what they see their role is, what is their background and what their training consists of then click here for a YouTube video of a couple of Student PA's describing their role, background and training: Or for more details click here for a link to the University of Leeds Physician Associates pages.