Health Education England (Mandate)

Thursday 1st May 2014 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

Today the Government have published the Health Education England(HEE) mandate for 2014-15. This will come into effect immediately and was developed following consultation with stakeholders.

The mandate is published every year and sets out what HEE will need to deliver with its nearly £5 billion budget in the coming year, on the areas of:

Work force planning;

health education; and

training and development.

It complements the work set out in the Government’s mandate to NHS England and the Government’s response to the Francis report, focusing on how we can support the health care work force through excellent education and training so that they can continue to deliver the very best care to patients.

The mandate will make sure that HEE delivers the right health care work force with the right skills, values and competencies. The Government’s priority in developing the mandate is to train and retain a health care work force equipped with the skills to deliver much more proactive care and support for patients in the community, and with the right skills to support people with long-term medical conditions to live with dignity in their own homes.

Specifically, the mandate will:

support families through pregnancy by creating a work force that can deliver personalised maternity care, improving the specialist skills needed to provide care to mothers with mental health and substance misuse issues so that specialist perinatal mental health support is available for every woman who needs it by 2017;

allow care assistants and health care support workers to break through the NHS careers glass ceiling and progress into careers in nursing and midwifery by improving the access to fully funded part-time degree courses for health care assistants and maternity support workers in order to ensure that staff with strong caring experience can access higher education;

place greater emphasis on children’s health by:

a) ensuring the training is available to enable more GPs to develop a specialist interest in children’s health;

b) improving training in child health for all GP trainees through new courses; and

c) further expanding health visitor capacity and equipping them with the skills they need to carry out the important work they do;

make sure mental health is given the importance it deserves by:

a) ensuring the training is available to for more GPs and nurses to pursue a specialist interest in mental health;

b) ensuring post-registration training in perinatal mental health to ensure that trained specialist mental health staff are available to support mothers in every birthing unit by 2017; and

c) developing training programmes that will allow all staff to have an awareness of mental health problems and how they may affect their patients by January 2015;

improve training available to GPs on the psychological and physical needs of veterans and their families by making a specially trained GP available to every clinical commissioning group (CCG);

roll out specialist dementia training to an additional 250,000 staff by March 2015, and make these opportunities available to all staff by the end of 2018 to improve the care of people with dementia;

train and develop a work force with skills that are transferable between different care settings by working with partners across the health and care system to review current curricula and training pathways, and develop common standards and portable qualifications. This will support the delivery of integrated health care and ensure staff can more readily work across different care settings as increasingly more health and care is delivered in the community and via primary care services;

contribute to improvements in public health outcomes by continuing to develop public health specialists and improving the public health skills of all health care staff supporting important priorities such as antimicrobial resistance and immunisation; and

ensure all recruitment into NHS funded training posts incorporates testing of compassionate values and behaviours, in addition to technical and academic skills, by March 2015.

The mandate also tasks HEE to deliver value for money, transparency and the reform of education and training funding.

“Delivering high quality, effective, compassionate care: Developing the right people with the right skills and the right values: A mandate from the Government to Health Education England: April 2014 to March 2015” has been placed in the Library.

Copies are available to hon. Members from the Vote Office and to noble Lords from the Printed Paper Office.