SUCCESSION PLANNING: IHEEM ROUNDTABLE
otherwise I don’t think NHS engineering careers will be in people’s minds.” Pete continued: “You’re quite right. One particular estates director, who contacted me about two years ago, was so frustrated in his efforts to attract new recruits that he established his own engagement with local schools and went to Careers Days himself, pitching at that level. The key, though, is that this should be happening nationally. It shouldn’t be down to one individual.”
Geoff Neild had ‘done the same sort of thing’ at his last Trust: “I went to one local college, where those students interested in an engineering career told me they had never considered the NHS, as they did not want to be a doctor or a nurse. There is seemingly no recognition of a healthcare engineering career path, or that there is a bigger team behind the clinicians working to support them. We don’t even have any standard advertising material or leaflets; we need that national profile. It’s not, however, just the EFM sector, but also all the other support services – IT, Finance, and HR are all suffering.”
Armed services model
Fiona Daly said: “What the RAF and the Army have done promotionally apprenticeship-wise is a great model – encouraging new people in via high profile campaigns, and this is something we need to do in health, that I am, in fact, talking to Health Education England about. I think it would be quite a significant programme to initiate, but all the allied health professionals would be keen. What is great is that we are working successfully with appropriate policy- makers and across government departments to gain support for our work. In addition, both the Carter and Naylor Reports have highlighted the need for succession planning. In fact I think all the pieces are in place. What we need is to get all the data together, and create a strategy, with a story to tell – so that we can start plugging the message that we need funding for particular areas. For instance, if we produce a Funding Skills Matrix we will be able to clearly demonstrate how much we might need for the various elements, and how much developing running a particular apprenticeship might cost. “People need to know there is a structure. Lots of people are undertaking pockets of activity, but we need to pull it all together and identify clearly what we need for the future.”
A manufacturer’s view Pete Sellars next asked Phil Wade, a director of nurse call, bedhead trunking, and fire alarm specialist, Static Systems Group, for his comments from a manufacturer‘s standpoint. Phil said: “It’s great to hear that those of you from
Kim Phillips, director, and Mark Cunningham, Electrical Design engineer, of independent consulting engineers, Eta Projects.
professional institutions, and at bodies such as NHSI, are clearly well on the way with this initiative. If I contrast where the healthcare engineering/estate management sector is on apprenticeships with organisations such as the Army and RAF, all they really have over us is a bit more structure to their process. Armed forces representatives do, however, visit many job fairs with professionally produced literature and information. They eat, speak, and talk the apprentice language. It’s apparent that we haven’t yet been able to do that.
“I think IHEEM could actually start to push this harder, perhaps from a Branch level, or via an Education Officer who can engage with students at their level – perhaps somebody who has been through the route, and takes that on, so that corporately at IHEEM there is somebody tasked with producing
literature and information that supports you. We have to make a healthcare engineering career more attractive to the next generation, and to career-changers.
A ‘huge’ workforce
“At Static Systems we employ just over 200 people, but you – in the NHS – are dealing with a huge workforce. We do, however, sometimes struggle to make ourselves attractive, because people consider us to be a small engineering company that might offer limited career options. On the flip side, people come to us because we are quite different to Jaguar Land Rover, who are local to us. On the one hand JLR offers some very good apprenticeships, but, as recently happened, a young chap had been offered an apprenticeship by JLR, but decided he didn’t want the role since he might be focused too much on just one aspect of engineering, be that mechanical or electrical. With us he could envisage a considerably wider range of potential roles.
“Taking that further, to me a major attraction of healthcare engineering is that you come across a very broad range of equipment, systems, and components – from medical gases to nurse call, and from power generation to water safety. Where else other than healthcare engineering can you go and actually learn about such a vast array of equipment?”
Benefiting ‘both sides’
Static Systems’ Phil Wade was one of many delegates and speakers at IHEEM’s annual conference last year in Manchester to have begun his career as an apprentice.
Pete Sellars said: “I fully understand where you are coming from, Phil, but from a professional institute standpoint I look at it a bit differently – we should simply be promoting careers in healthcare engineering, whether that’s in the private sector or the NHS. Do something effective to bring apprentices into our industry, and both sides of the equation will benefit. That cross-fertilisation – moving around – might, Fiona, be
August 2018 Health Estate Journal 35
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