Student Placement Expansion.

As a vital part of the NHS workforce, one of the ambitions set out in the NHS Long Term Plan is to develop sustainable growth of all allied health professional groups.  A key part of this is scaling up the number of people in learning. If employers are to meet this ambition and support the recruitment drive for this, then placement capacity, while maintaining the required quality and level of educational support will need to increase.

The Devon AHP Faculty will work alongside the Devon CPEP to increase AHP placement capacity across the Devon STP.  

Initially the faculty will work to produce a toolkit to support use of technology enabled care services (TECS) as part of student placements.   The term TECS has been adopted by NHS England as an umbrella term for health care that is provided via telehealth, telecare, telemedicine, telecoaching and self-care apps.  This includes video or phone or appointments as well as a student working remotely from an educator.

The use of TECS is becoming commonplace in delivering a range of AHP services.  This means in order to equip students for the current and future workplace practices it is important that they engage with this type of service delivery as part of their placement experience.

This toolkit aims to:

• Help build placement educator knowledge, skills and confidence to support the use of TECS as part of, or in some cases whole placements.
• Increase the use of TECS
• The increased use of TECS has been shown to be one tool in safe and appropriate placement expansion
• May help to address some of the concerns related to information governance
• The toolkit aims to build clinician confidence to integrate these approaches as part of placements.