Forging links with our local further education college

We have traditionally worked in silos in the public sector, rarely considering or even having time to trial working with our colleagues in other areas. 

Our PCN Hub is located a very short distance Warrington and Vale Royal College. I was aware that our town had a shortage of health and social care trained staff and I was interested when the college opened a Health and Social Academy in 2022.

In the summer of 2023 I reached out to the leads and we arranged an informal chat to discuss how we could mutually support each other. We discovered it was proving a challenge for the college to find sufficient work placements and opportunities to meet health professionals from the full multi-disciplinary team. 

Our PCN staff then arranged a programme of talks where a different additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS) staff member would visit the college each week and give a short presentation on their role and their route into their career. The students were also able to ask questions.

The full range of job roles including paramedics, mental health nurses, pharmacy technicians and nurse associate attended the visits and the feedback from the students was good. Three of our six practices have agreed to take health and social care students on work placements. 

Most recently we have also started to include the digital skills students in this joint working. They are now visiting practices on work placements offering NHS App drop-in sessions for patients who need help setting this up and understanding the functionality. 

Last month we organised a ‘live brief’ sessions with students from both departments.  They were organised into mixed groups and were tasked in consider a key health theme and how younger people access information about that topic currently. 

They have continued the work in college and will shortly present back proposals of what key information they feel their peers need to know and a plan of how they would communicate this using the technology available to them. The topics included mental health, vaping, sexual health and healthy lifestyle.

We are hoping to welcome students to support patients during our spring covid booster vaccination campaign.

It has been beneficial for us to learn about how our colleagues in education work and also how younger people access health information. It was striking to learn the amount of information young people picked up from Tik Tok and other social medica sources, however many did have knowledge of how to test whether information they had received was factual or not.

We hope that the exposure to primary care and PCNs will encourage more people to explore roles in this sector and that they may one day want to undertake roles in the NHS. We see this as the start of our relationship with the college. It’s been such a positive experience I’d encourage other PCNs to reach out to their local college and see what partnerships can be formed.