Primary care teams continue to work tirelessly in their communities to provide high quality care and support for their patients. The NHS England and Improvement three confidential coaching offers have been designed to be easily accessible and tailored to your individual needs. Our experienced coaches can help you as an individual, support you to manage your team and reflect on your career goals and ambitions.

This is an opportunity to prioritise your needs whilst you are also taking care of others. View each offer on their website, available to everyone working in primary care.

North Yorkshire and York NHS providers must work jointly with their stakeholders to ensure Special Educational Need and Disability (SEND) systems, processes and practice standards are effective, efficient, and compliant. It is noted that commissioning and local authority boundaries differ across the Integrated Care System.

The attached training offer is constructed in relation to service provision for children and young people (CYP) across the three areas. The Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership training is designed to support health professionals to provide the best possible health advice for children and young people's EHCP's. If you have any questions for the SEND team, please contact:

• North Yorkshire: hnyicb-ny.send@nhs.net
• York: hnyicb-voy.send-ehcp@nhs.net

A new initiative to encourage more healthcare and/or non-clinical staff to take up sign language as an extra language and skill, is now available locally. The Signs4Life scheme is to help people to communicate and engage with vulnerable service users, patients, and colleagues, who may be hard of hearing. 

Radiyya Jahan, Signs4Life partnerships officer, explains: “There are more than nine million hard of hearing people registered in the UK. We have already worked with social workers, housing staff, teachers, the local NHS, and Royal Mail. We wanted to open our programmes to the general public, who might also have an interest in learning sign language. It is offering a community six week BSL program, which you can enjoy and access from the comfort of your homes, delivered through Zoom." Signs4Life is leading efforts towards a society in which people with disabilities have full access and are working to raise the public and political awareness of disability provision. For more details on the Spring community programs in BSL and the autism spectrum, please sign up here.

In Professional Development have just released a small pot of funding to help support existing and future Primary Care Leaders to access specialised leadership and management training through the CMI Approved PCN Development Programme. They have three part-funded places available on this programme which focuses on senior leadership, change management and understanding current issues within the NHS and look at the future of primary care and PCNs.

How will this benefit you?

• Gain a clear appreciation of the position of PCNS in the broader NHS landscape;
  • Supporting the sustainability and resilience of general practice
  • Integrated care systems and the long-term plan
  • Wider political issues

• Understanding of my role in PCN
• Have tools to develop effective teams
• Be confident to develop a strategic plan for your PCN

This programme is flexible in delivery and can be delivered face to face in a city centre location near you, or if you prefer to study online, you can attend our interactive, virtual classroom. We can also tailor this programme as a virtual or face to face group session for your team. For further details contact Mike Johnson, Executive Education Team In Professional Development on M.Johnson@inpdtraining.co.uk.

A collection of new sessions on stopping over-medication of people with a learning disability and autistic people (STOMP) has been added to the MindEd mental health elearning programme. Developed by Health Education England elearning for healthcare (HEE elfh) in collaboration and partnership with NHS England’s STOMP team it features 5 knowledge-based elearning sessions and 1 skills building case study which cover the following topics:

• Inappropriate Prescribing (for a universal audience)
• Psychotropic Medication 1 (for a universal and non-specialist professional audience)
• Psychotropic Medication 2 (this session is specifically aimed at a specialist audience, primarily psychiatrists, psychologists, GPs, pharmacists and mental health and learning disability nurses)
• Psychotropic Medication 3 (for a universal audience)
• How to Challenge Inappropriate Medication 1 (for a universal audience)
• How to Challenge Inappropriate Medication 2 (case study) (for a universal audience)

For more information and to access the sessions, please visit the MindEd programme page.

A new eLearning module has been developed to support general practice administrative staff in sorting, signposting and delivering administrative triage using digital tools, with the aim of supporting an inclusive approach to managing demand and workload. The module has been developed in partnership with HEE elfh and the Practice Managers Association. There are five sessions covering:

• introducing administrative triage
• designing a practice workflow and setting up a triage list
• promoting the service to patients
• confidently taking patients, or their nominated carer, through an online consultation request over the telephone or in person
• sorting patient requests and signposting to the right place, service, or clinician for clinical triage.

Eating disorders are common and Anorexia Nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. A suite of training has been and continues to be developed in response to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) investigation into avoidable deaths from eating disorders, as outlined in recommendations from the report titled Ignoring the Alarms: How NHS Eating Disorder Services Are Failing Patients (PHSO, 2017).

It is designed to ensure that health and care staff are trained to understand, identify and respond appropriately when faced with a patient with a possible eating disorder. It is the result of collaboration between eating disorder charity Beat and Health Education England with key partners. The suite of training has been developed and tailored for specific staff groups supporting patients and service users with eating disorders. Current training available is for medical students, foundation doctors, nursing workforce and GP and Primary Care Clinicians. Further information is available, here.

ORCHA has worked with practising clinicians and universities to create the Digital Health Academy: free, CPD-accredited learning in short video format. The Academy has been designed to develop and improve your understanding and use of digital health, so that you can confidently assess and recommend digital health solutions with the expert perspective from which you stand in every other aspect of your work. The Academy can be accessed here and here. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please send these to academy@orcha.co.uk.

About the Digital Health Academy:

The Digital Health Academy has been designed by practising health and care professionals and education experts. It includes:

●      Short, 5-minute modules, to suit busy schedules.

●      Accessed online, anytime.

●      Two foundation modules, to provide a consistent standard of knowledge.

●      All content is independently CPD accredited.

●      Coming soon: A series of clinical modules across topics such as digital health for mental health, diabetes, physiotherapy, long COVID and winter pressures.

●      The Digital Health Academy foundational level has been made available through sponsorship support from Boehringer Ingelheim UK and Ireland.

Haxby Group GP Practice has launched a new GP Mentoring and Support Programme, offering bursaries to people wanting to become a GP. The new programme is designed to offer support to future doctors and those applying to medical school across the region.

Anyone interested in becoming a doctor will get the chance to apply to the GP Mentoring and Support Programme, set up by Haxby Group GP Practice. It promises to give people a practical understanding of what it’s like to work as a GP, as well as helping them navigate the application and medical training stages, from undergraduate to postgraduate training. Further information can be found, here. 

As part of the national Primary Care Health and Wellbeing Programme, GPMplus has secured funding to pilot peer mentoring for NHS  Dentists, Optometrists and Pharmacists working within Humber, Coast and Vale. The pilot has now been extended and is available to all leaders working within NHS Dental, Optometry and Pharmacy services in Humber, Coast and Vale. For example:

• Dental Nurses
• Dispensing Opticians
• Pharmacy Technicians
• Managers

The overarching aim of the peer mentoring pilot is to improve resilience and retain experienced staff working in primary care. The GPMplus mentoring service is available free of charge to Dentists, Optometrists, Pharmacists and leaders that deliver NHS services within Humber Coast and Vale. If you deliver part private and part NHS services you are eligible to access the service. Individuals accessing mentoring will each be offered up to eight hours of 1:1 mentoring support, provided by trained and experienced mentors, all of whom have experience of working in Primary Care Dentistry, Optometry and Pharmacy. Further information is available, here.

NHS England and Health Education England have launched an elearning programme on virtual wards, to support doctors, nurses and allied professionals in the use of technology to provide safe, acute-level care to patients at home. This supports the NHS’s ambition in the 2022/23 NHS planning guidance to increase the number of virtual wards across England.

The elearning is for clinicians to gain an understanding of implementing and running a virtual ward enabled by technology. It should be used alongside organisations' own local policies. Complete the programme on HEE’s elearning for healthcare platform in around 30 minutes. If you have any questions about virtual wards more broadly, contact us at england.virtualward@nhs.net.

Health Education England Primary Care School (Yorkshire and the Humber) are pleased to offer general practice staff training, which is initially free at the point of delivery. If you would like to take up this exciting opportunity, please read the attached guidance paper and complete the application form and email to: voyccg.coresupervisionyorkshireandhumber@nhs.net.

In practice, this model of supervision involves a supervisor arranging and facilitating on-going 6-8 weekly supervision sessions for 6-8 supervisees. This totals 6 sessions a year for 1.5 hours per session. This supervision model is suitable for post qualified registered and non-registered clinicians working in general practice across Yorkshire and Humber. The presentations, relevant documents and policy will all be shared on completion of the course. Should you require support/signposting with educational supervision e.g. FCP Roadmap Supervision training, please make contact with Dr Martin Sutcliffe Martin.Sutcliffe@hee.nhs.uk.

As primary care teams continue to work tirelessly looking after others, it’s important to look after themselves. ‘Looking after you’ coaching is for everyone working in a primary care role. These confidential coaching offers have been designed to be easily accessible and tailored to individual needs:

• ‘Looking after you too’ supports individuals to cope with their situation and stay well
• ‘Looking after your team’ is for those who lead, manage, or organise a team or group, to find ways to enable healthy team working
• ‘Looking after your career’ can help people to take more control over their career direction.

Find out more and access the ‘Looking after you’ coaching, here.

Nearly half the adults in England (43%) struggle to read and understand health information. When that information includes words and numbers, that rises to 61%. This means important details, such as dosage and how to take medicines can be missed.

Health Education England has developed a free, 35 minute, online health literacy course, designed for anyone working with or supporting patients, families and carers. Sign up today for the online health literacy course on the NHS e-learning for healthcare platform. Find out more about improving Health Literacy.

This is an opportunity for those who lead, manage or organise teams, groups or networks in primary care to access confidential coaching about their team and to develop practical tools and methods to work with your team in whatever way is important to you.

Conversations may include how to:

• support new team members and embed new roles
• connect as a team and improve performance
• build an environment of trust and safety.

Having an open and honest conversation with an experienced coach at a date and time that suits you can help to create a more resilient and compassionate team culture. Coaching is free and is available Monday to Saturday.