Health Education England (HEE)

I’m Stuart Baird, I am currently an assistant professor for leadership in healthcare, with Coventry University. Prior to that I’ve got about 18 years’ experience in the NHS and social care, largely working around workforce planning, workforce development, and education and training. Health Education England is one of three national bodies sitting alongside NHS England, NHS Improvement and Public Health England, and it’s responsible for the planning and education, training of the NHS workforce in England, and it covers largely all aspects of workforce education training from undergraduate level through to postgraduate level, and also elements of professional development, for example advanced clinical practice.

At national level, so it’s a national organisation, so it sets policy and implements government policy, so example the National People Plan for the NHS and in terms of the current situation with the pandemic, it’s coordinating the payment and the placement of students at the current time. At regional level it works with medical and non-medical education leads and professional academic leads within universities, to support students in terms of quality but, also in terms of curriculum development. So HEE’s responsibilities is around the education and training of the workforce, but works quite closely with the other national bodies around performance, and recruit and retention, and planning and those sorts of things.

At local level, so it supports local healthcare systems, as they’re being developed. It does that very much jointly with NHS England and NHS improvement. So each area of England has been split up into 44 local healthcare systems, initially they were called Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships, but they are sort of evolving into what’s being termed integrated care systems. It’s very much about integrating service delivery at local level, and HEE is supporting the workforce elements of those. But it also supports workforce planning and development around the key care groups. So for example mental health, primary care, cancer, again that’s around delivery of national policy at regional and local level but around education, training, and recruitment, retention and all aspects of workforce policy.

It obviously has a national structure, so its national board is chaired by Sir David Behan, and it has an executive team with a variety of responsibilities, and currently the interim chief executive is Wendy Reid who’s also the medical director and it also has, what they call a national kind of programs structure, and in a regional level, it’s split across seven regional teams which each of which is overseen by a regional director and they largely engage at regional level with the other national bodies and senior leaders within the NHS largely. Its overall budget, so HEE has a budget of around £4bn and roughly 90% of that directly supports education training for medical and non-medical students.