Problems we are trying to address... aligned to the Long Term Workforce Plan

Continuing to increase our workforce, including educators, in order to meet the current and future needs of patients and the public is a priority. Through our engagement to develop this strategy, academic evidence and insight provided by our stakeholders, there are common issues compounding the challenges across all sectors of the educator workforce that need to be addressed.

• Successful development of a future workforce requires planning for, valued recognition of and investment in, an educator workforce.
• Enhancing and expanding the capacity of our workforce is essential both to address the backlog of care and to meet future need. There is an opportunity to build workforce and team productivity now by increasing capability, confidence and understanding across teams.
• In many professions education, teaching and training were significantly impacted by the COVID pandemic. Addressing this requires a greater focus on education and training and an expanded, engaged and motivated educator workforce.
• Evidence shows that support for education and training can create a positive environment to improve retention and encourage staff to return.
• Educators and would be educators in the clinical environment are reporting burn out and insufficient time due to increasing service pressures.
• Having time available to support learners may reduce the risk of burnout and attrition.
• Those involved in education and training are increasingly reporting feeling undervalued.
• Appropriate access to and capacity of workplace supervision is a challenge across all healthcare professions.
• Digital technologies can transform the support for learning, but the educator community needs to have access, the capabilities and capacity to support learners to use these.
• Educators need to feel confident in equality, diversity and inclusion to be proactive in changing culture.
• Addressing this challenge requires us to explore new models of education and training support as more of the same will not be sufficient.
• Multi-professional educator development accelerated the development of different models of healthcare during COVID.
• Rebalancing clinical and educator workload, especially of our more senior workforce, can reduce burnout and maximise the available educator workforce.