Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy

WRaPT is a Workforce Repository and Planning Tool that the local Connecting Care Workforce group has agreed to use to model workforce across local healthcare providers and then use this data to look at the workforce implications of various scenarios in changing the provision of local services. Such service change could include: Developing a GP employed fully integrated community and practice nursing team? What is the impact of Clinical Pharmacists on general practice workload and the implications for skill mixing in General Practice? What might the impact of seeing the 30% of patients who are reported to not be needed to be seen in Emergency Departments in general practice? It is really exciting stuff but the first step is to get some baseline workforce data and then the plan is have a workshop to discuss what scenarios we want to model. The tool is a repository for workforce data and also activity associated with this workforce. The activity data that is fed into the tool de...

Physician Associates (PA's) are relatively new roles in general practice in the UK. PA's work under the supervision of a doctor and are trained to perform a number of day to day tasks including: Finding out why patients are visiting the doctor Examining patients Making diagnoses Analysing test results Developing treatment plans for patients. To become a Physician Associate they will have been a graduate, often with a first degree in a biomedical science subject, and have undertaken postgraduate training. They finish their course with skills and competencies equivalent to a F1 doctor. They will need further training and clinical supervision during the first couple of years after qualification.  The Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy is facilitating the creation of PA rotations across our local Acute and Community Trusts. The rotations are for two years with PA's spending 8 months in three placements. To find out what a PA does in General Prac...

The Academy held its first formal board meeting last week and it was an opportunity to review the progress we have made. Overall the Academy wants to: Lead and facilitate innovative workforce development Commission, provide, facilitate, quality, affordable and local training Develop initiatives to retain general practice staff We have chosen to use the 'Three R's' to group our objectives - Recruit, Retrain and Retain. Below are a few slides that list our achievements to date: As you can see from the slide we are massively ambitious in what we want to achieve. We are making good progress for some of our objectives but some of our objectives are very broad. We are in the process of SMARTing up some of our really broad objectives so that by the end of August we will be able to present a much clearer vision of what we are going to have achieved by the end of March 2018.

The GMC National Trainee Survey results have now been published. The survey ask trainee doctors to rate their workload, training and supervision. The results are available and searchable online - to get to the results click here . The National Trainee Survey reports survey results for trainees in each training programme by Deanery. Each box is a score out of 100 which represents who positively or negatively trainees answered the question to each indicator. The higher the number the more positive was their response. If the box is not coloured it is similar to the national average. If it is highlighted red it is significantly worse that the national average and highlighted green is better than the national average. Below is the data for our local hospital and also for GP trainees in our local GP training practices: As you can see trainee doctors in local GP practices are much more satisfied that their colleagues in hospital training posts and indeed for three indicators were m...

The NHS Leadership Academy has developed a development programme for clinicians who would like to join a Clinical Commissioning Governing Body within the next 12 - 18 months. The nine month programme includes: An assessment process including completion of the Healthcare Leadership Model 360 feedback Three residential elements covering system and personal leadership, the role of commissioning leaders and the opportunity to explore CCG-specific knowledge Attendance at three Action Learning Sets Coaching and mentoring Facilitated shared learning You are eligible to apply if you are:  Looking to join a Clinical Commissioning Governing Body within the next 12–18 months. Wanting to develop your leadership skills Working on a complex commissioning project Looking to network and share experiences with peers  The programme dates are: Development Centre – 26 th  & 27 th  September 2017 Module 1 – 21 st  & 22 nd  November 2017 Module 2 – ...

Last week Primary Care First, our local Advanced Training Practice hub based at College Lane Surgery, Ackworth announced that funding for the 2017/18 GP Nurse Ready and Apprentice HCA schemes. These are great schemes that support practices to appoint newly registered nurses to become practice nurses and new apprentices to become HCAs. Across Wakefield previous GPN ready schemes are starting to have an impact on the GP nurse workforce with the number of nurses under 35 years of age nearly doubling in the last two years. The number has increase from 7 wte to 15 wte - so the scheme is making a difference. For the GPN Ready scheme there is £8,000 to support practices over two years. Practices receive £1,500 when a new nurse joins them and about £1,500 when the new nurse has a mentor qualification in year 2 of the scheme. The remaining £5,000 is held by Primary Care First of commission and provide training for the GPN in the first two years of their employment in general practice. For t...

GP numbers nationally are falling. Below is a chart of wte GPs in England: As you can see they peaked in 2013 and have fallen since. However, Wakefield is bucking the trend in that our numbers of clinical staff have increased over the last three years. Practices have submitted data to a workforce survey over the last three years and it shows increasing numbers of all staff in general practices in Wakefield. Indeed Wakefield has the most GPs, GP Nurses and administration staff of any CCG in West Yorkshire! The data from the workforce survey is tabulated below: Workload in General Practice continues to increase. Below is a chart of the number of consultations by doctors and nurses in practices in Wakefield that use SystmOne. As you can see the total number of consultations has increased over the last five years. The number of consultations by GP's has reduced and those by GP nurses has increased. This is particularly relevant to the question of whether we are in a wo...