Trust inspected for its training

Sussex’s ambulance service is ‘taking action’ to improve its training and education after an inspection into its apprenticeship programme.

Ofsted visited South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust in late July and early August and in two of three areas found leaders had made ‘insufficient progress’.

At the time of the monitoring visit 132 apprentices were on levels 3 and 4 standards-based programmes in two areas: associate ambulance practitioner and emergency support worker.

The inspection found ‘insufficient progress’ was being made by trust leaders to both ensure all the requirements of successful apprenticeship provision are met and to ensure that apprentices benefit from high quality training that leads to positive outcomes.

Reasonable progress is being made to ensure effective safeguarding arrangements are in place.

In response a spokesman for the NHS trust said: “SECAMB is taking action to ensure it delivers the best possible standard of education and training to current and future staff.

“Following these findings, and those of a subsequent peer review commissioned by the trust, it is apparent that we need to take action to ensure we are providing the very highest levels of education and training.”

A six-week planned closure of its clinical education South East Coast Ambulance Service has more than 100 apprentices

department, which will see a pause in the delivery of most classroom-based learning, will allow the trust to undertake a gap analysis before implementing improvement measures.

The SECAMB spokesman added: “Following the pause, we are confident that, by working with staff and utilising support from a range of external sources, we will be able to resume delivery of a full programme of education and training.”

The Ofsted report described how leaders and managers ‘do not have an effective process in place to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment’.

Inspectors also found facilitators and programme leads ‘do not create learning plans to meet apprentices’ individual needs’, while feedback on work is ‘brief, overly positive and does not help apprentices understand how to improve their work’.