New education officers step in at Walsall Manor to train nurses
Ten new education officers have been appointed to run face-to-face training sessions with nurses working at Walsall Manor Hospital.
The move has been announced by the trust's interim deputy chief executive and chief nursing officer Professor Ann-Marie Cannaby in her new year blog to staff and the community.
Among their duties temporary Practice Education Facilitators(PEF) will be responsible for showing newly arrived international nurses the ropes while they settle into ward shifts, studying governance policies and incident root causes.
She said the appointments followed a similar scheme in operation at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust(RWT).
"As this is my first blog of 2022 I wish all staff across both trusts a happy new year. I hope you all managed to have some down time and relaxation over the festive period.
"I start the year with some good news for you on the recruitment front. I am delighted to announce we have appointed 10 Practice Education Facilitators at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, following the introduction of these at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust in 2019-20.
"I am keen to emulate the success we’ve had at RWT, with facilitators at Walsall and I’m confident that with a similar structure in place, we will."
She said the team will be responsible for up to 65 hospital staff each until the end of March, but it was hoped the roles will be extended for another 12 months.
The facilitators will carry out training sessions in a variety of settings, such as a classroom, bedside, clinical areas and simulation, provide support for all in a clinical area, from student nurses, allied health professionals and ward managers.
Other areas to address include falls training.
"Look at where we need to provide more training for nurses by examining governance and root cause analysis, where events are studied where patient harm or undesired outcomes have occurred in order to identify and address the root causes.
"Each PEF will be responsible for their own wards and allocation of whole time equivalent staff so they will be able to develop relationships with those colleagues to ascertain their education needs.
"This is a new initiative at Walsall and follows substantial investment. All 10 positions are permanent, with three senior PEFs and seven who will report into those three.
"Walsall currently has around 130 new international nurses from all over the world. Many of these have come from countries very different to ours, so the PEFS will assume a pastoral role to support them.
"This will help the nurses settle into our culture, for example, helping with accommodation, schooling if they have children of that age and setting up a bank account, as well as work-related objectives such as competencies," she added.
