Having the right staff with the right skills in the right place to meet the needs of people and improve their health is our primary overarching driver. The Nursing and Midwifery Faculty will enable this through the leadership of the Chief Nurses, workforce, and educational leads across the system. Working in collaboration to co-design improvements to enable a tangible difference at the front line. This will include collaborative action on recruitment and retention which is a vital component for the ongoing management for service developments and recovery for the NHS following COVID -19 pandemic as well as supporting wider staff health and wellbeing.
The ambition is to support local workforce strategies that set out a range of actions that are bespoke and empower trusts to deliver better outcomes for people through a structured approach which is focused around 3 key pillars:
- Look after our students, nurses, and midwives.
- Develop new ways of working and delivering care
- Growing the workforce for the future.
The faculty is co-chaired by Dr Kathryn Cobain and Jackie Edwards.
“It is our absolute privilege to chair the Nursing and Midwifery Faculty for Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Nursing and midwifery workforce and education has been a shared continual focus and passion, with a core belief that if we can improve the experiences for nurses and midwives in their careers, we will improve patients and their loved one’s experience of the care”
Kathryn is the Chief Nursing Officer at Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB, having started in this role in May 2022. Before this, Kathryn was Director of Public Health for Worcestershire. Kathryn is also a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian and Caldicott Guardian within the ICB and is passionate about promoting health and wellbeing and providing equal opportunities both in residents and staff.
Jackie is currently Interim Chief Nurse for Worcestershire Acute NHS Trust. Prior to this she was Deputy Chief Nurse since 2018 with a focus on leading the Nursing and Midwifery workforce, patient safety and quality, supporting safer staffing and recruiting to an international nurse programme. She is also an Associate Lecturer at The University of Worcester.
Together, Kathryn and Jackie’s experience as qualified nurses and broader, working through various roles post registration, nursing related Degrees, Masters qualifications and Kathryn’s public health background have brought them to having an understanding of the lived experience, opportunities and challenges that can be encountered. Both believe their nursing qualifications and experience have enabled fulfilling, challenging and varied opportunities.
Coinciding with National Nurses Day in May 23’ , we are delighted to be relaunching our ‘Preparing for your future as a nurse’ online programme on the NHS Learning Hub. Please share the information below with relevant students and staff in your organisation.
Designed for second and third-year nursing students, the programme includes information to help with the transition from student nurse into a first post as a registered nurse, with advice for searching and applying for a first job, what to expect at the start, how to make the most of the early stages of a nursing career, and much more.
We have recently updated the programme with more information in the ‘What to expect from preceptorship’ section to support the new national preceptorship framework for nursing. More resources have also been added to the self-care and wellbeing and clinical supervision sections, and students should find the content easy to digest with new videos, infographics and links to useful external resources.
The programme is hosted on the NHS Learning Hub, which is free to access for all students and NHS staff. Students can access the content at any time and can work their way through it around their university or placement workloads and schedules.
Visit the 'Preparing for your future as a nurse' programme to find out more.
