Refreshed Work Experience Toolkits for Health and Care Organisations Launched

Work Experience can be a vehicle to help make our future workforce reflective of the populations that we serve. High quality work experience can be Inspirational, insightful, providing practical experience and exposure to varied, impactful and lifechanging careers in the health and care sector.  It can raise aspirations and widen access and participation into health and care roles, as well as addressing very real workforce challenges. 

To add to the Future of Healthcare Work Experience Discovery Report and the Leeds Deep Dive Report, HEE has refreshed and relaunched the work experience toolkits it has in place for secondary care provider organisations, GP practices, Dental practices, Careers Advisors and developed a new toolkit on the subject of Work Related Online Learning. These toolkits are an extremely helpful suite of resources for organisations which will save them time and money, but will also help to support their work experience programmes by highlighting the governance and safeguarding element of putting in place a work experience placement which can sometimes get overlooked.

These toolkits have been stripped back and streamlined based on system and user feedback, they now include forms and templates that organisations can use to help form a range of processes linked to work experience, such as the allocation and targeting of work experience opportunities, governance and information and guidance.  They sit within a suite of work experience resources, support and information and will add value to the new HEE quality assurance framework due to be launched in Spring 2022.

The challenges NHS organisations face in recruiting certain types of staff are well documented, therefore it is vital that we use all the tools available to use in order to ensure our NHS organisations can recruit the staff they need, work experience is one of those tools. Furthermore, we know that in places work experience opportunities have been distributed in a way that disproportionately favours those who have inside connections to the NHS, we must change that  to ensure that opportunities are widening to enable a broader mix of people who are taking up work experience placements and eventually taking up roles in the NHS are from a wide range of backgrounds and importantly represent the communities they serve.

We at HEE want to give health and care organisations all the help they need to put in place formal mechanisms for using work experience to attract people for our mutual benefit, the toolkits can help us to do that together. We want people who are on the look out for work experience opportunities to be able to understand the process and these toolkits will help organisations to put those systems in place.

Work experience gives the individual the opportunity to have a real look at what doing a certain job will actually be like, but it is also a useful way for health and care organisations and the NHS as a whole to attract people to jobs and careers in health and care.

We at HEE hope that this suite of toolkits will provide support, information and practical guidance for organisations to plan, deliver and evaluate high quality, meaningful and above all equitable work experience opportunities.

Visit our dedicated page to access the toolkits.

Becky Orton, National Programme Manager, Widening Access and Participation, Health Education England