Since December 2020, Sarah McRae, Project Manager within the Greater Manchester Training Hub, has led on the one-year HEE-funded GM Enabling Effective Learning Environments (EELE) Primary Care Private Independent and Voluntary Organisation (PIVO) EELE project within Stockport and Wigan nursing homes.

Sarah has provided her perspective on the project below, highlighting the importance of widening access to learning environment opportunities in social care by identifying and overcoming barriers, and the need to address the challenges of PIVO learning environments. The outputs from this project underpin work involved in the first year of implementation of the GM Health and Care Learning environment strategy.

Throughout my nursing career, I have been fortunate to be able to support learners from all backgrounds in all specialities. Although the majority of my career has been in secondary care, most recently as a clinical educator in critical care, I originally started in care homes as a care assistant and have a great deal of respect for the sector.

When I heard about the EELE project, I was keen to get involved. As I recall, there was very little exposure to the sector in my nurse training, and the idea of choosing a career within the sector was not well publicised at all. I saw this a fantastic opportunity to develop exposure to care home careers and highlight the fabulous work that goes on in the sector.

To start with, I needed to look at requirements from learning environments to achieve the learning objectives of the course, and although initially my remit was for student nurses, I hoped that the learning environments could be expanded to other AHP learners.

Most seemed achievable within these environments but where I saw gaps in attainability, I started to think about how these could be achieved, for example, with spokes or enhanced visits to services that work with the sector, e.g. primary care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, dietetics, and pharmacy.

Once I was sure all these learning needs could be obtained, I created a database of the care homes within the Wigan and Stockport localities (as these were the areas stipulated for the pilot) and narrowed down to nursing care.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to contact all these homes over the last few months, and open some great discussions with care home managers about the range of learning opportunities they could provide. I discovered how keen they were to welcome learners and support them in their learning journey.

Time was then spent looking at training needs required by these learning environments, and plans drawn up of how this training could be provided. We are now working together to prepare these staff to support learners working in the home care sector as soon as possible, and create bespoke learning pathways individual to each home and their specialities.

I have been fortunate enough to spark interest within one of my learners to shadow and work alongside me on this project, giving me the insight of student perception and expectation for these learning environments to help guide their formation.

I am looking forward to embracing learners in these wonderful environments over the coming months, and I hope they and the homes gain some fabulous experiences.

Related