Health Education England Annual Report highlights successes

The HEE annual report is now published and so we can look back at some of our key success of the last year. It has been an unprecedented time in the NHS in the last few months due to the impact of COVID-19 on services, the workforce and of course patients. HEE’s people played their role by helping over 30,000 students and trainees offer their services to the front line. We have worked in partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement, the Department of Health and Social Care, HEIs, employers and professional regulators to support the system when it needed it most. We also provided global education through our HEE-e-Learning for Healthcare Covid-19 programme, free of charge.

Looking back further in the year before the pandemic we also have many successes to be proud of including:

• Investing £36 million in advanced practice, training and recruited record numbers of General Practitioner (GP) trainees.
• Investing in Return to Practice and invested £18million to support community nurses wishing to undertake the specialist practitioner qualification that will enable them to become district nurses.
• Approved the provision of an additional £150 million to NHS Trusts in 2020-21 to help employers to allocate every nurse, midwife and Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) a £1,000 training budget for over the next three years.
• Focused heavily on the largest workforce gap, nursing, by developing new accessible routes into education and training through apprenticeships and converting nursing associates after further education and training.

Dr Navina Evans, Chief Executive, Health Education England said:

“This report has been published whilst we are in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has brought fundamental changes to how we operate and so as we reflect on the past year, it’s clear that our mission remains the same. HEE is part of the NHS and works with others to plan, recruit, educate, and train the health workforce. In 2019-20 the organisation has shown itself as nimble and effective in delivering this core task at pace and scale and I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every member of HEE staff for all their support and hard work. We have a huge ambition to be the best place to work and I look forward to supporting you all to deliver that ambition in the coming years.”

Link to Gov site. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-education-england-annual-report-and-accounts-2019-to-2020