Education for Health is a registered long-term condition charity based in Warwickshire. Its CEO, Dr Linda Edwards, was appointed in 2017 with a mandate to futureproof the organisation by ensuring it was business-ready to meet the training and education needs of healthcare professionals in the 21st Century.
Having transformed the charity into a dynamic, financially stable and thriving entity focused on supporting health improvements, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic hit the reset button and forced Dr Linda and her team to take pivoting action.
Part of the organisation’s success in doing so, according to Dr Linda, is owed to the sheer amount of resilience shown within all aspects of the charity’s running.
“I think resilience is the one word that resonates throughout the last 18 months,” Dr Linda told The Leaders Council Podcast. “That’s to say, resilience of ourselves as an organisation and resilience of our people that come and learn with us.
“For us, back in March 2020 when Boris Johnson made his lockdown announcement, it was like the air was sucked out of our lungs. We quickly furloughed seven per cent of our staff, and then it was a question of ‘What on earth do we do now?’ and ‘Can we actually make this work?’.
“It was then that a very loud voice in my head said: ‘Of course you can make this work: you’re a respiratory education and training charity, so you’re made for this!’. So, we set about putting in place as many systems and processes as we could to support the people who were learning with us, because we had people on academic courses who were juggling different ways of working. Some of them has been put on the frontline while still trying to undertake an academic course with us, so we looked at how we could speed up the educational process by putting all our training programmes into a virtual environment.”
Having acted swiftly to take its services online, Education for Health’s pandemic response has been met with praise by many of those that benefit from its resources.
“Talking to our learners and students now, they've been really appreciative of the support that the tutors have given them, and of the fact that they've been accessible when perhaps other courses have stopped,” Dr Linda explained.
Of course, it was not entirely a smooth transition, with many individuals training with Education for Health having little alternative but to defer or request extensions to their courses.
“Many people were extraordinarily stressed and understandably so. We therefore had a lot of people needing extensions on their courses or who had to defer,” Dr Linda recalled.
“That said, I was absolutely amazed that 600 people during the first six months carried on with their education. And then when I was talking to them, I discovered that many of them found it quite refreshing to have a little bit of headspace outside of their lives. Many people were juggling home-working, working on the frontline, and looking after their children, so a space to clear their minds of that and come to learn really helped them from a mental health point of view.”
Buoyed by the positive impact that Education for Health’s enforced changes to training provision have had, Dr Linda is determined to ensure that the charity can continue to adapt to the changing needs of its learners in the future. The key to facilitating this, as she explains, is effective communication.
“We are continually talking to our learners and asking them what they need and what they think the future looks like, and how could we do things differently or better. The consistent message is that education provision works really well in the virtual environment.
“We feel that doing it online makes education and training three-dimensional rather than one-dimensional. It provides opportunities for our learners to learn and absorb information in small chunks. They can also meet virtually with groups of people who are on the same journey as themselves, and they have found that invaluable during the pandemic and all the associated isolation.”
Dr Linda also feels that offering a virtual route to education offers advantages for learners in terms of time efficiency.
Dr Linda explained an example scenario: “If for instance, you work in a GP practice and need to go on a course, if your course is face-to-face, the practice has to release you for a day to travel to and from the learning venue and therefore loses capital. However, if people have the option of doing training over two-to-three hours per week to access live webinars and carry out e-learning, that travel and additional effort is not necessary, we can do more with our time and it is more productive for everybody involved.
“It is important that we get the provision side of things right with healthcare education. People working in the profession need to refresh and keep up to date with their skills is what is a stressful environment. We don’t stand still, and we are constantly evolving and looking at what we can do to support people and to make learning easy and fun so that people have a good time when they're doing their learning. This provides people with a release from the very full-on world of working in the sector.”
To this end, Education for Health has developed a Level Four Higher Education Certificate course as a stepping-stone qualification for budding Healthcare Assistants and Healthcare Support Workers, to prevent them from having to delve into the intense Nursing Assistant Training Programme earlier.
The impact of this, Dr Linda believes, will be increased confidence among learners and better rates of learner retention.
“We have recently been accredited to provide a Level Four Higher Education Certificate course that we've developed over the last six months to enable Healthcare Assistants and Healthcare Support Workers to put their toe on the academic ladder without having to go into the full nursing assistant programme which can be a bit overwhelming.
“This provides the ideal stepping-stone for them to build their confidence and competence, and it may help people develop a career in the profession who may otherwise have been put off by the intensity of it all. And now, more than ever in this age where recruitment struggles are rife, retention is key to the profession.”
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