Website of the Department of Health

Activity

During 2004-05, the number of training places offered by the Appointments Commission to chairs and non-executives rose to 5,000, up from 4,000 on the previous year. A total of 2,700 places were provided at national events and 2,300 places were provided by your regional training boards for locally designed and delivered events. A further 1,200 places were provided at board leadership programme events held in London.

Demand continues to increase and most regions are now planning a comprehensive programme of events for the coming year, including regional conferences, regional briefing days, equality and diversity training, risk management, good board papers and so on. Our target for 2005-06 is 6,000 training places. Please remember that if you have any specific topics you think would be useful, let us know via the e-mail address above.

Regional news

From this month John Hunter (currently RTF for east midlands) will be taking over as the commission's head of NHS training. Chris Dye will still have overall responsibility for training, but in future will take up the post of director of marketing and training to work with NHS Foundation Trusts and other government departments on all aspects of our work.  We are also pleased to welcome Sue Bedward (RTF for west midlands) back from maternity leave.

All chairs and non-executives should now be receiving quarterly regional calendars outlining the training events in their particular region. We are currently working on the format of these to include the level of training and make it easier to link to the core competencies.  This should help people identify specific training needs, particularly following annual appraisals. If you have difficulty accessing your regional calendar, they are now on our website or available through your chair or RTF.

Regional training boards are considering options for delivering training to chairs and non-executives based on the core competencies. The south west and north west have commissioned a programme of training from the Institute of Directors, and the northern and Yorkshire, and eastern regions are considering local training options with more locally based individuals or academic organisations.

As mentioned in the last bulletin we are working with the NHS Confederation to organise training or networking opportunities in the afternoon of regional network meetings. The first of these is to deliver awareness training on Connecting for Health at network meetings from September onwards. You should receive details shortly.

Induction

Four residential induction events for new non-executives were run earlier this summer. Evaluations continue to be very positive and we shall build on the helpful comments received to further improve future events and to make them as interactive as possible.

Dates for future non-executive induction events are:

In future, we will invite new non-executives to a choice of events across the country spread over a six-month period to offer more flexibility.

The induction events for new chairs continue to be well evaluated and, similarly, new chairs are to be offered a choice of dates and venues as soon as possible after they are appointed.

Audit committee conferences

A further three events have been organised in conjunction with the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HfMA) in response to the over-subscription of those held at the end of last year. Delegates to those events gave positive feedback.

The next are to be held on 17 October in London, 18 October in Birmingham and 3 November in Leeds. There will be no charge for at least one non-executive from each board and details and invitations will be issued by the HfMA shortly.

Finance training

The subsidised programme for 2005 has been designed with three different agendas. These cover an introduction to NHS finance, a more advanced session on the role of non-executives in the finance agenda and a specific programme covering Payment by Results (PbR). The PbR sessions have now finished but will be repeated in the future. You should already have received notification of the remaining dates and venues however they are listed below.

Introductory events:

The non-executive role in the future of NHS finance:

Full information and booking details are available by contacting the HfMA on 0117 929 4789.

Competency-based recruitment training

This programme of training is now complete. Almost all chairs and independent assessors have completed this training and we are grateful that space was made in busy diaries to attend these important events and for the comments made on the framework. The issues raised are currently being discussed.

Future training on this subject will be delivered to new chairs at their induction events.