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Quality Assurance
Self-Assessment
Launched in 2022, NHS England’s Annual Provider Self-Assessment (SA) is the first multi-professional and nationally consistent assessment process for all healthcare learning environments. The SA offers insight into the quality of healthcare placements from a provider perspective, providing a national overview of education and training quality compliance against NHS England’s Education Funding Agreement, Education Quality Framework, and key education quality initiatives.
The SA questions are aligned to the Education Funding Agreement and the six Education Quality Framework domains:
- Learning environment and culture
- Educational governance and commitment to quality
- Developing and supporting learners
- Developing and supporting supervisors
- Delivering programmes and curricula
- Developing a sustainable workforce
Results provide an overview of compliance in relation to each of our quality domains and key performance indicators. It provides NHS England with an understanding into how our standards are being delivered, identifying common trends and challenges that are being faced by placement providers. The results enable placement providers to identify opportunities for improvement and areas that require further support from internal and external sources.
Benefits to providers
The SA encourages healthcare providers to take ownership and responsibility for assessing the quality of their learning environments and putting activity in place to address concerns arising as a result. Providers will be able to use the SA as a form of re-assurance to other stakeholders to whom they report for example, regulators, commissioners.
Embedding the SA as part of providers’ internal governance frameworks, particularly at Board level, demonstrates a commitment to quality improvement and transformation.
To attract and retain workforce, the SA can be used as a useful promotion tool to demonstrate commitment to education and training.
NHS England Education quality interventions - published reports
NHS England, Workforce, Training and Education is responsible for ensuring that there are high-quality learning environments for all healthcare learners in England. Since the publication of the multi-professional Education Quality Strategy and Education Quality Framework in 2016/17 (since refreshed in 2021), regional teams have used a suite of agreed quality interventions to monitor and improve the quality of education and training across England. These often involve gaining direct feedback and insights from learners and their supervisors/educators during visits to the provider organisations where healthcare education and training, funded thorough the NHS Education Funding Agreement, is delivered (including an increasing variety of settings in the primary, secondary, community and independent sector).
NHS England, Workforce, Training and Education is committed to publishing an outcome report within 50 days of a quality intervention taking place (this does not preclude improvement work commencing ahead of publication).
It is important to note that the details provided in these reports relate to a snapshot of the learning environment at single point in time and are underpinned by the views, opinions and experiences of healthcare learners, educators and management (triangulated with other evidence where possible). Our regional teams and the provider work collaboratively to address any areas outlined where education quality standards, as set-out in the education quality framework and NHS education agreement (formally NHS education contract), are not being met. We will also seek to identify, highlight and share good practice where we find it.
NHS England Education quality (WT&E) - quality assurance reports
From October 2024 published reports can be found on the NHS publications site at Education quality: assurance reports.
Reports published before this date can be found on the NHS Learning Hub. All you need to do is sign up for an NHS Learning Hub account and search for ‘quality assurance’.
All reports are publicly available and can be accessed using the links above.
Please note that the evidence presented in each report will include the views, opinions and experiences of healthcare learners, educators and management at a particular period in time.
Archived reports are available on request, please email england.wte.quality@nhs.net