The Generalist School as part of ‘Enhance’ in Health Education England Yorkshire and Humber
The North East Yorkshire region is part of a national rollout to explore, promote and deliver generalist skills as part of the national ‘enhance’ programme of work across England.
Generalism is about broadening and keeping breadth of clinical skills and developing understanding of each other across healthcare settings. The programme is responding to the needs of the future, with population needs becoming more complex and people living longer. The programme follows the Future Doctor Report and further detail on the national work and roll out can be found here. HEE NEY have, as part of the trailblazer (or pilot), established two Place Based Schools including one based across the Humber and another in North Cumbria.
Our approach is multi-professional and geographically focused. The trailblazer invites learners from the local healthcare system across the Humber to join a 1 year programme that has been developed to align with and complement local needs. It covers learning such as equality, diversity and inclusion, human factors and food insecurity, environmental sustainability and complex multi-morbidity and importance collaboration to provide person centred care.
Delivery of the programme is led by a local Head of School, Miss Helen Cattermole. It is supported by our Yorkshire and Humber Postgraduate Dean Dr Jon Cooper and Regional Postgraduate Dean, Professor Namita Kumar.
The Humber Generalist School now has two cohorts running; the first started in April 2022 with 30 participants and will finish in April 2023. The second cohort has a similar number of multi-professional participants, including social care colleagues, and began delivery in September 2022. Formal evaluation of the programme is underway, but initial feedback includes:
- I want to pinch myself – I can’t believe I’m being given the time and space to think about this
- My head is buzzing with new ideas
- The multi-professional learning environment is the most useful part of the course
- What the [course] has prompted me to do is seek involvement from the wider health and social care community to enhance the project and patient care…I was encouraged to seek out experiences that would broaden my mind, knowledge and understanding of health and social care systems that I might not know exist, or that I had taken for granted without a great deal of thought.
- This freedom and autonomy that I have been allowed almost makes me uncomfortable.
- The module has resonated with me so much…I am going to continue this work throughout the course and indeed my career
There will be another cohort commencing in the Humber region in September 2023. This will include Foundation doctors on a specialised programme, as well as interested members of the wider health and social care community. In the meantime, we are exploring running a third cohort in a different part of the region. Keep watching this space for updated information and application details.
FAQs
It is an educational programme open to all healthcare staff working across the Humber region. Participants can be registered or unregistered health professionals who will learn together in a cohort over a twelve month period. The programme focuses on enhancing generalist skills – the areas of practice which span all specialties and professions such as providing person-centred care, working sustainably in complex systems, reducing health inequalities and managing patients with multiple interacting comorbidities. It is a professional development programme, and as such, managers who support services to become more integrated, patient focused, sustainable and efficient will also find they can learn and contribute, and bring this learning back to their workplaces.
This is a trailblazer site as part of a national programme to enhance generalist skills.
The programme is offered on a geographical basis to allow local networks to be formed, and to allow training to focus on the local population needs.
Most people will need to commit about 4 hours a week to cover the programme, although this learning can be taken as deeply or as broadly as you wish. There are seven modules, each lasting seven weeks. Six are core modules, and the seventh is an applied module with a choice of topics. There are fixed points at the beginning and end of each module to allow the cohort to learn together, with flexible, guided self-learning in between.
The programme is free to participants; it is funded from the public purse by Health Education England.
Definitely. There is no level of prior academic learning required to participate. Most of the learning is self-directed so you can tailor your learning to your own interests and styles. There are options for learning via practical skills, projects, visits and shadowing, as well as more traditional learning such as lectures, workshops, reading, e-learning, videos and podcasts. There is no formal assessment but participants will be expected to reflect on their learning throughout the course.
Participants will be issued with attendance certificates detailing their continuing professional development (CPD) hours. We have also applied for continuing professional accreditation (CPD points) with the Royal College of Physicians for each of the delivered elements of the course. Additionally, for those who choose to do this, there is an opportunity to undertake a Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Practice, Leadership and Management (CPME). This will involve additional time and money. The current cost of the PG Cert is £2700. We are unable to fund the full cost of this, as the pilot programme was not funded for academic study, although we will try to help with the cost if we have money available. Other sources of funding may be available to help with the costs (for example, Trust CPD funds).
The national enhance website gives more details about the pilot programme, and links to the excellent programme handbook which describes the programme and its learning in more detail. We are developing a website for our pilot programmes in the North, and this is likely to be hosted on the HEE websites for HEE NE and HEE YH when complete.
The Head of School is Miss Helen Cattermole, based in Hull Teaching Hospitals (helen.cattermole@hee.nhs.uk) and the Training Programme Director is Dr Mohamed Malik, based in Scunthorpe Hospital (mohamed.malik@nhs.net). Our Programme Support Manager is Julie Thomson (julie.thomson18@nhs.net) and we can all be contacted for further details.
