Overview

Successful delivery of improvements to the Education Commissioning System require a number of fundamental changes in the education required to deliver London's healthcare needs. This means NHS London education commissioners have to change the way in which they interact with and manage the healthcare education market to increase quality, drive up value for money and stimulate innovation.

The starting point is the development of our strategy to direct our market development activity. Current evidence shows the following challenges still exist in developing the education market to provide the required workforce to deliver improvements in the healthcare system:

• ensuring sufficient appetite and expertise to support intervention and raise standards/create change
• translating changes in policy to bridge gaps between ambition and delivery
• pursuing world class at all times
• ensuring education spending reflects the needs of the strategic plan
• aligning incentives with required market behaviours and priorities
• training clinicians to be effective leaders

In order to overcome these challenges, NHS London needs a market development strategy that creates an education market that:

• is shaped by a requirement for quality, setting the bar at world class standard
• reflects changes in London's healthcare ambitions and NHS London's strategy to meet them – for example, more flexible patient care pathway skills and developing leadership skills
• responds to new requirements quickly and effectively; including flexible delivery modes and changes in qualification profile (for example, move to a graduate midwifery and nursing workforce)
• delivers the quality of education required for a world class health service, developing innovative approaches to raise the quality bar.

In understanding the healthcare workforce changes required, we have identified a number of requirements of the education market. These are described below:

Improvements so far

The purpose of the Market Strategy work we have undertaken to date has therefore been to understand the healthcare service and workforce changes required and their impact on education provision, and to stimulate discussion around the principles upon which we may need to interact with / manage the education market to meet the changing education needs.

To date, the Education Commissioning Programme has developed a number of principles which will underpin our future market development activities

• Market development principles
• Maturity options for developing education markets

Market development principles

To support the market strategy a collection of proposed market development principles have been drafted. The principles under consideration are described within the attached document.

Maturity options for developing education markets

A set of options have been developed for discussion which provide an overview of how we might build our market management approach. These options are described within the attached document.

Future changes being planned

The immediate priority is to continue to develop the work to develop an education market development strategy which will underpin delivery of required healthcare changes. Initially we are planning to conduct research to inform the detail of this education market development strategy, including which markets we should develop differently, how and when. Engagement with the Education Market throughout this process will be key.

If you would like to find out more about the Market Development approach, please contact the Education Commissioning and Workforce Planning Strategy & Development team at education.programme@london.nhs.uk.