Real unity in challenging times

The past weeks have been turbulent and unsettling for many with the news of the passing of our Queen. It has been a challenging time but one where I think we have seen real unity across the country, from the millions of people for who the Queen was a constant presence and from the many whose lives she positively influenced and changed.

Now, as we end our mourning period, work is continuing again at pace to work together to help drive and shape the future of the new NHS England, bringing together HEE with NHS England and NHS Digital.

It is just over six short months until we will merge to become one single organisation, affording a real opportunity to integrate workforce, finance and service planning and delivery, and enhance support for our people across the NHS, bringing benefits for patients and colleagues alike. 

Many of you have supported the important design phase for the new organisation and I want to thank you for your input, particularly into the new Workforce, Training and Education Directorate in the new organisation, which I will lead from 1 April as Chief Workforce, Training and Education Officer.

This new Directorate’s purpose is to ensure the NHS in England has the workforce to deliver high-quality services for all, now and for the future, with the objective to support people in health and care from pre-recruitment to post-retirement, for all ages and career stages. It has been invaluable being able to hear from you around this key objective and how we can best ensure we work together with the wider health and care system to achieve it.

The past few weeks have seen a number of key themes that you, and our respective system partners, have raised, which we are now feeding into the wider design team to help inform final decisions on where workforce, training and education accountabilities and delivery sits across our shared parts of the system, nationally and regionally.

These themes ranged from flexible funding models to enable more efficient and effective commissioning; ensuring we truly integrate and lead on workforce planning and standard setting; and acting as a centre of excellence with the right expertise and support for systems to meet the required standards and improvements.

Continuing to pilot new approaches and share best practice and really helping to transform digital capability remained high on people’s agendas; alongside our shared and continued focus on culture, values and behaviours and around equality, diversity and inclusion.

As well as the actions that we take, we have also talked about how to best manage our relationships, and themes of trust and empowerment, clear accountability and collaboration were strongly highlighted as those that will enable us all to work together to best effect.

There were many other areas and issues that you took the time to share with us, and all of this insight will be invaluable so that we get the design of our new function right – being responsive and planning for the needs of our NHS workforce now and in the future, ensuring we retain their expertise, and ultimately in providing better care and experience for our patients.

Best Wishes

Navina

Dr Navina Evans

Chief Executive 

Health Education England