Ambulance education team wins prestigious innovation award from NHS England

The education team at North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) wins the ‘Innovation Practice Placement of the Year Award’ at this year’s Enabling Effective Learning Environments annual conference with NHS England.

The conference, held in Newcastle, celebrates excellence in practice education, placements, and our future workforce.

Innovation Practice Placement of the Year Award requires demonstration of innovation in increasing quality and capacity for placements across the ICS (Integrated Care System). This means developing new models for education and expand capacity to provide multi-professional students with high quality, sustainable learning experience.

In 2021, the education team at NEAS undertook a project to improve paramedic student placements. This included improvements to processes, ease of access to systems such as GRS (Global Rostering System) and issue of keys and ID cards.

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The team also made significant improvements on the induction process for students which now sees students have a week-long induction to go through vehicle familiarisation, complete mandatory education and face-to-face information of policies, process, values and expectations.

First year students now complete observation shifts with our Patient Transport Service (PTS) to support the development of knowledge of services NEAS provide.

A 24/7 on-call manager is now available to provide welfare support to all BSc students who are out on jobs and the education team also work closely with universities to support mentors with feedback on some issues students may face.

Assistant Director of People Development, Karen Gardner said: “I nominated the team for this award to recognise the significant work the team has done organising and managing student placements.

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“Our colleagues NEAS play a big part in supporting our future workforce and we hope this work will have a positive impact on our students. This welcome to NEAS gives students a full insight to NEAS and an overall better welcome to the Trust.

“The amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to manage, plan and deliver this is unseen work and I want to acknowledge the massive task this is to plan and coordinate it all and deliver the new induction process for our BSc students.

"I also want to thank our wonderful paramedic mentors who support students when they are working operationally and work really hard to ensure they have a good experience.  

"Thank you never seems enough, but I do want to thank everyone that plays such an important role however big or small into supporting students across NEAS. I feel extremely proud of the team for winning this award and so lucky to be a part of such a great team.”