Lucy Ashmore spent most of her professional life working part-time at a nursery, supporting children with special educational needs. There wasn’t much career progression but the hours meant she could pick up her daughter and three stepchildren from school. When they got a bit older, she realised she wanted to really focus on her career. “I started looking for jobs in hospitals because I’d always wanted to be a nurse, but I ended up as a radiology assistant at the George Eliot hospital NHS trust in Warwickshire and loved it.”
She thought she’d hit a dead end when considering her career options within ultrasound. The traditional route is an undergraduate radiology degree then, after a couple of years, to specialise and go into ultrasound if there’s space on the training course, she says. “That could take five or six years. I loved ultrasound but was 48 at the time.” When the trust announced it was starting a three-year degree apprenticeship in medical ultrasound, she jumped at the chance. “I was over the moon when I was accepted.”
The NHS is facing an unprecedented recruitment and retention crisis, with an estimated 111,000 posts currently unfilled. Demand for NHS services is growing faster than the talent pipeline, and events such as Brexit, after which 4,000 European medics left the country, and the Covid-19 pandemic, have put additional pressure on the remaining workforce. In 2023, the government published the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, outlining plans to address an expected shortfall of up to 360,000 staff by 2036/7. The expansion of apprenticeships plays a significant role in that proposal, facilitating the training of nurses, allied health professionals, and other clinical staff. Overall, the government aims for more than one in five (22%) of clinical staff to be trained through apprenticeship routes by 2031/32.
Sheffield Hallam University is home to the National Centre of Excellence for Degree Apprenticeships, supporting close to 3,000 degree apprentices across a variety of sectors and roles. It recently received a £460,000 grant from the Office for Students to invest in its apprenticeships, and will launch a new course in nursing later this year.
Degree apprenticeships, where you earn while you learn, are proving particularly effective when it comes to boosting diversity, says Sheffield Hallam’s vice-chancellor, Prof Liz Mossop. Almost half (45%) of the university’s students on that pathway come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and there’s a higher proportion of mature learners compared with a traditional degree. “They’re very attractive to people who come to education a bit later,” she says.
Ashmore is now in her second year and says she “loves it all”. She works 37.5 hours a week over four days at the hospital and spends the fifth day studying. Online learning is complemented by face-to-face time at the university, where there’s simulated wards and exercises in virtual reality (VR) to give students practical experience in a safe environment. There’s a dummy called Eve, for example, that can be adjusted for different scenarios, such as gallstones or pregnancy.
“You need to be able to practise constantly,” says Ashmore. “With VR you can take organs out of the body or move them out of the way. You can see where the muscles and ligaments are, all in 3D. It helps build up that spatial awareness.”
Ashmore’s supervisor and the AHP practice educator for radiology at the hospital, Rebecca Magrath, says degree apprenticeships have really helped the trust recruit and retain staff. “We had some good support workers who were interested in furthering their careers but were having to leave the trust to fulfil those aspirations,” she says. “Now they can see there are opportunities within the department. And when we go out to recruit for the support workforce, we are inundated. People can see there are opportunities within radiology and we’re tapping into a whole different workforce pool.”
Upskilling current members of staff has also added benefits for the wider team at the trust, she adds, not least because they spend much more time together than with a student on a traditional placement. “They’ve already got a head start, with a wealth of experience and knowledge about patient care. And they’re a member of staff, which leads to improvements with team working and relationships in general.”
Sheffield Hallam has been really supportive, says Magrath, hosting tripartite meetings every 12 weeks (between the university, trust and the learner themselves), and organising drop-in meetings for her to speak to other educational leads. “The implementation of an apprenticeship like this is really a team effort. [Sharing knowledge] has been really useful, especially because it’s such a new course,” she says.
As the Department of Health and NHS England debate how to solve the health service’s workforce challenges, Mossop would like to see the expertise of universities tapped into more. “We’re often looking very much at short-term crises in the NHS. We need to be thinking about the longer-term pipeline, where we’re going to recruit our students from, but also where we’re going to recruit the healthcare educators of the future from? Regionally, we're working really hard and really collaboratively to tackle the pipeline and the challenges we have with recruitment and retention here, but nationally that picture doesn’t feel as joined up as we’d like to see. Universities are a really important part of this discussion.”
For Ashmore, doing a degree apprenticeship has given her a second chance at building a fulfilling career in healthcare. “If I’d known I wanted to do this 18 years ago, I might have done [an undergraduate degree]. But to be in the position where I can still earn a proper wage and support my family, while bettering myself and getting a career in something I love, is just brilliant.”
This feature was first published in Guardian Labs in June 2024
