10 years of HEE, what have they ever done for us?

The world has changed in that decade. We lost Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro and Queen Elizabeth II. We landed a spacecraft on a comet, found liquid water on Mars, and took the first picture of a black hole. Same sex marriages were legalised, the Black Lives Matter and Me-too movements rose, and we left the European Union. Natural disasters, wars and terrorist attacks happened around the globe. And we lived through the first global pandemic in a century. The world is a different place.

Operating with budgets failing to keep pace with broader NHS funding, through the introduction of loans for undergraduate health students, NHS reorganisation and the more recent Covid-19 pandemic, enormous pressure on NHS staff and current requirements to recover services HEE has delivered year on year.

Year One: HEE Kent, Surrey & Sussex developed a world leading initiative with the Alzheimer Society to understand life with long-term conditions and the vital role of carers through student nurses working with Alzheimer sufferers and their families. In the West Midlands a simulation enabled Skills Bus trained 1,700 nurses in community and rural settings. HEE Yorkshire and Humber created 40 Clinical Leadership Fellows to innovate in their journey to becoming Consultants.

Year Two: East Midlands’ ‘Pre-GP’ pilot gave doctors a better understanding of a GP’s life, before applying for GP training. West Midlands, partnered with St Basils and a local NHS Trust to help young homeless people through apprenticeship courses. Innovative radiography equipment and a unique ‘Simbulance’ delivered simulation-based training in the South-West and Thames Valley. We launched Oriel, a new technology solution for recruiting doctors and dentists in training which, in its third iteration, includes pharmacy and healthcare science, has managed over 525,000 applications so far. We also published Framework 15 which outlined future healthcare through the lens of the patient and published Knowledge for Healthcare, the strategic framework for NHS knowledge and library services.

Year Three: HEE launched the Care Certificate with Skills for Care and Skills for Health for around 20,000 health care assistants and social care support workers in its first year. We launched a new Genomics Master’s Degree and our Shape of Caring Review saw the new Nursing Associate profession born. We also recognised the contribution of Specialist and Associate Specialist doctors through the SAS Charter with partners, NHS Employers, AoMRC and BMA and launched the first ever Quality Framework for education and training.

Year Four: New VR technology in the East Midlands saw a postgraduate dental training suite become the first centre of excellence. In London we worked with Great Ormond Street to focus Nursing Associate trainees, from the first 1,000 in this new profession, on children and young people. We also recruited over 3,000 GP trainees for the first time ever and passed 600,000 NHS staff trained in dementia awareness through our online programme.

Year Five: HEE North delivered improved opportunities for underrepresented groups through apprenticeships, pre-employment and youth engagement. E-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) grew by a million to 4.75m sessions as part of our Digital Ready Workforce ambition and our Health Careers schools competition saw a record 123 schools and 10,000 children take part. HEE also produced ‘Facing the Facts, Shaping the Future’, a draft long term workforce vision for the NHS for consultation which led to half a million words of stakeholder feedback. The HEE Star, a tool of over 400 products and resources, was launched to support local evidence-based workforce transformation.

Year Six: Our first National Education Training Survey got 24,000 responses. The new Nursing Associate profession recruited 5,000 trainees and the ground-breaking Topol report, ‘Preparing the healthcare workforce to deliver the digital future’ was launched to global acclaim. We helped deliver 1,500 new student medical places, with 5 new medical schools in areas of high deprivation. We published the Mental Health and Wellbeing of NHS Staff and Learners Commission, doubled the NHS Graduate Management Scheme intake and started to expand midwifery training places by 3,650 over four years.

Year Seven: Covid-19 hit yet our Medical Education Reform implementation resulted in 1,400 Foundation and 250 Psychiatry priority applications. We surpassed 3,500 new GP trainees and discussed a new medical apprenticeship idea with medical schools in Cumbria and North London. We provided £150m for nurse, midwifery and AHP professional development. We created Topol Digital Fellowships, an NHS Digital Academy, a Diploma in Digital Health Leadership and a Digital Nurse Leadership programme. We helped 40,000 students and trainees support Covid-19 front line and we launched Best Place to Work to improve HEE’s culture, people and practices. HEE established and got its first cohort of Blended Learning students on programmes.

Year Eight: HEE’s Global learners Programme with overseas governments and 50 NHS Trusts deployed 900 nurses, including 180 in intensive care to support the Covid response. Our free Covid-19 e-learning was used 4.5m times globally across 120 countries. We created a foundation interim year which saw 3,800 doctors deploy early across the NHS. We supported 23,000 nursing students to support the NHS pandemic response. Our Strategic Vision for Simulation and Immersive Technologies proved how far we had come since the 2012 ‘Skills Bus’.

Year Nine: We learnt about the new NHS England and our abolition; meanwhile our Midlands Charter won the BMJ Workforce and Wellbeing Team Award and East of England launched a unique multi-professional foundation school. Our online vaccination training programme was used more than three million times. Members of 200 NHS Boards completed our Digital Boards programme. We helped ensure a record 28,815 chose nursing degrees, recruited over 4,000 GP trainees for the first time, filled over 99% of trainee places in hard to recruit areas and delivered a record 24,500 apprentices in 178 different careers. Also, since 2016 over 44,000 newly qualified mental health staff have been produced and our patient safety syllabus, the world’s first, was used 7,000 times in its first year.

In our last year HEE once again broke GP trainee records, remained on course to deliver 50,000 new NHS nurses, grew the Digital First agenda, created a unified NHS Knowledge Hub through our knowledge and library services which enabled the workforce to access all resources in one place with a single search, launched the world’s first medical apprenticeships with 200 starters, e-LfH hit 100m session launches from 2.5m users, and we stand on the brink of publishing the first national long term workforce plan.

The cumulative impact of those 10 years is over 104,000 doctors, 125,000 nurses, 165,000 Allied Health Professionals, 17,500 pharmacists and 6,500 dentists and dental practitioners contributing to net growth of 73,000 NHS clinical staff.

HEE has also innovated. The NHS has recruited 11,000 Nursing Associates in the last two years alone. More than 600 people have started blended nursing degrees since 2020 and, we have led the recruitment of 115,000 apprentices since the levy was introduced in 2016. All of this on top of record numbers of GP trainees year on year. The HEE Star has now been used in 98% of ICS areas.

As HEE bids goodbye, our work continues in the new NHS England, which will build in our commitments to a new and different workforce, widening participation to improve our workforce’s diversity, and preparing our workforce for a radically new technologically driven future. HEE may not have been perfect but there is much to be proud of as we build in our new home.