SUCCESSION PLANNING: IHEEM ROUNDTABLE
apprenticeship programme co-ordinated by the Northern & Yorkshire NHS Assessment Centre (HEJ – June 2018), which was first established 42 years ago, and through which a number of current- day estates directors, including IHEEM’s Council members, have gained their initial training. He said: “They have a fantastic model in the North-East, and are happy to share it with the rest of the NHS. This begs the question: ‘If it works there, why can’t it also work in other regions?’.’’
Keen to work with colleagues While not itself a provider of development training, IHEEM was, he said, ‘keen to be part of working with colleagues in bringing together some sort of national apprenticeship scheme that serves the NHS’. Pete Sellars said: “I know Eastwood Park is experiencing problems getting such a scheme approved nationally, and indeed IHEEM is encountering similar issues in the North-East. When we took forward and presented the criteria and content of our proposed course – and IHEEM and HefmA have both been involved in working with our colleagues in the North-East – the powers-that-be asked: ‘Why is this so special; can’t you just bolt it onto a construction apprenticeship or similar?’ That is the backdrop, and we are looking to NHSI for leadership. IHEEM has also been carefully considering the NHS ‘Capacity and Capability’ agenda, to see how we can come together to make the case for a national apprenticeship scheme, led by NHSI, and supported by the professional bodies. Does this resonate with everyone here? This was the reason for bringing this particular group together.”
An ageing workforce
Geoff Neild was the first to speak. He said: “There are some really key issues – we have an ageing Estates & Facilities workforce, and little real understanding of its profile, coupled with a massive skills shortage, and don’t easily attract people in; they don’t see the NHS as a great career provider for an engineer or someone wanting to work in ‘hotel’-type services. Also, speaking as a former HR professional, there tends to be a perception at senior level that there is no point in training engineers because we don’t pay them enough. We thus get them through the apprenticeship, the contractors take them away, and they go and earn twice as much working as ‘subbies’ on site. There is a real potential time-bomb of a lack of skills. We rely on stealing such personnel back at an age where perhaps they don’t want to have to get up at 5.00 am to travel to a construction site, and would rather work closer to home, but we can’t go on relying on this.
“Nor indeed,” he continued, “can we
Apprentices in the classroom at Eastwood Park.
continue relying on external providers like Interserve and ISS to supply us with the skills the NHS workforce needs. We need to very quickly get together a national programme that draws people into the NHS using the apprenticeship route as a way to bring them in at entry level, and then mapping out a career route and showing them what they can achieve. It is also about bringing in people with some engineering experience, and turning them into healthcare engineers, because it is very different working on an empty building running cable on a site not yet commissioned, to being on a live hospital site where, if the wrong fuse is pulled, a patient’s life support machine goes off.”
Good ‘pockets’, but a lack of overall strategy
Geoff Neild acknowledged that there were ‘some really good pockets of good practice’, such as in the North-East of England, but felt there was ‘no overall apprenticeship strategy around the workforce’.
NHSI’s Fiona Daly said: “We will indeed be shortly be writing such a strategy – the Workforce Transformation Strategy for Estates & Facilities in the NHS – and launching it this Autumn. I am talking to many people about this currently. I was surprised, however, that there was hardly a mention of ‘Estates & Facilities’ in the national workforce strategy document for health and social care, Facing the Facts, Shaping the Future, which was published last December as a draft consultation document on behalf of HEE, NHSE, NHSI, PHE, CQC, NICE, and the Department of Health and Social Care.
Geoff said: “In fact, in a document that runs to over 300 pages, I noted just three mentions of ‘estates & facilities’ – two in the context of cost pressures, and the other, ‘back office’. We must get rid of this ‘back office’ tag.”
John Thatcher said: “The interest we have had in joining the Healthcare Engineering, Estates and Facilities Management Trailblazer Group from the private healthcare sector has been significant.”
Fiona: “I am with you, Geoff; we need to make estates and facilities careers attractive and pay and develop people properly. There are also funding streams that EFM directors aren’t currently able to plug into, and I am trying to address this. The apprenticeship stuff will definitely be in the Workforce Transformation Strategy.”
Pete Sellars asked: “So will the Strategy set out the entry points for all the different EFM disciplines, or will it be a strategy that simply makes the case that we need to do something around this agenda?” Fiona replied: “We have no accurate data at the moment, so are undertaking a big data collection exercise on workforce, following which we will have a lot of demographic information and will know the number of people we have. We know there is a skills gap and an ageing EFM workforce, but don’t have the data to
August 2018 Health Estate Journal 33
©Eastwood Park Training
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