Investing in the future

MariaPCC 12 June 2024

When organisations are faced with financial uncertainty, they often reduce investment in the training and development for their workforce. It’s not just financial uncertainty that can make prioritising training and development more difficult.  Increased demand from patients and directives from government to address that demand add to the pressures on an already stretched and stressed workforce.

At PCC, we know that investing in workforce development saves time and money not just in the short, but the long term.  The investment can take any number of forms from upskilling teams to manage change, deliver exceptional performance and allowing time to support individual and team wellbeing.

Many organisations realise staff look to work with, and crucially stay with, those organisations that demonstrate a commitment to personal and professional development.  In part, this realisation that investing in staff has such a positive benefit on staff wellbeing has meant that rather than the potential scaling back of training budgets widely indicated last year, in a recent survey, Corndel College London, who work with over 30% of the FTSE 100 companies found that 62% of organisations surveyed are planning to increase their training budgets in 2024.

This seems to be borne out by the fact that we have seen an increase in interest about our support, in particular general practice support, which suggests a real desire to look after and retain workforce and develop organisations for the future.

Those of you who read our newsletters regularly will have noticed that this year we are focusing on the support that we can provide to practices and primary care networks (PCNs) in four key areas – access, finance, premises and workforce.   These areas complement the national general practice improvement support currently available and are designed with practices and PCNs in a way that meets their individual needs.  The offer includes:

  • workforce, premises and financial reviews and training to support these areas
  • one to one support to practice partners, business managers and finance leads to help them get the most out of their practice’s income.

 

Each year, we run hundreds of training sessions, many are technical and personalised for our clients, and our most recent review found that 97% of delegates said they would recommend the event they attended to colleagues.

We deliver our training session in person as well as virtually.   Virtual sessions have proved to be popular for several reasons including that it reduces the time people spend outside of work.  However, what it also means is that there is an opportunity for cost effectively getting a much wider range of teams together and increasing the scope for organisations to work at scale.  In a recent series of workshops delivered to PCNs one of the comments from the integrated care board (ICB) who purchased the support was that “They [the PCNs] are all now looking at business continuity in a new light and an added positive is that some of the PCNs are working together.”

Given the digital world we operate in, it is important that recognition is given to the fact that we are more able now to develop and learn at a pace and time that suit us.  As well as the training and support that has already been mentioned, we offer the opportunity for individuals to use our e-learning platform which contains over 72,000 different courses, many of them CPD verifiable, that can be accessed 24 hours a day.  More information can be found on our website.

In summary, whether you are part of an ICB looking to develop the commissioning capabilities of your team to support providers or a PCN/practice wanting to ensure your staff have the confidence and capability to help grow the organisation, now is the time to invest in your workforce and make a difference to their lives and the sustainability of your organisation.

Some of the feedback we received following a recent training programme for 80 PCN staff includes words such as ‘inspirational’ and ‘life changing’, you get a sense of just how important investing in your workforce can be.

Take the next step and get in touch, enquiries@pcc-cic.org.uk to have a conversation about how we can help you support, train and upskill your staff. www.pcc-cic.org.uk

Mike Fry, adviser, PCC.

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