Career progression, training and support

Staff appraisal is important to ensure our staff are able to deliver in their roles and also receive the development they need.

Our Trust has an agreed appraisal process and this ensures that staff clearly understand expectations against their agreed objectives and Trust values and behaviours and are fully supported.

Our Learning and Organisational Development Team provide training for managers and staff on our Trust appraisal process and also ensure the process continues to meet the needs of our Trust and individual members of staff.

Our Trust is committed to utilising coaching conversations to develop our staff, teams and culture.

We have an internal coaching service, providing one-to-one and team coaching to support the development of individuals and teams.

There are a number of accredited individual and team coaches delivering the internal coaching provision.

Our Trust also participates in the Leeds Coaching Network with local authority and university partners.  The network supports ongoing development and supervision for our coaches.

We run a comprehensive range of compulsory training (also known as statutory and mandatory training) courses and modules for clinical and support service staff.
They include things like safeguarding, moving and handling, prevention and management of violence and aggression (PMVA) and resuscitation.

We offer a comprehensive employee induction and this includes local team induction and a corporate induction workshop, covering key information about our Trust and our services.

We actively support the development of our workforce, working with Higher Education England to fund staff to achieve vocational qualifications, develop their numeracy and literacy skills and advance to further programmes of study such as access courses and foundation degrees to enable career progression.

Opportunities will soon be available through the apprenticeship route for new entrants to the organisation and for our existing employees. Apprenticeships provide an opportunity to learn while you work with training tailored to you and delivered flexibly.

The Trust has won a number of awards for its apprenticeship provision and is working closely with the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Excellence Centre to drive the development of opportunities for the support workforce of this region.

We are committed to managing and growing the talent we have within our workforce. Competent and trusted leaders, at all levels, are key to the effective development of our organisation and will be vital in helping us to achieve our priorities and long-term strategic vision.

To support this we offer two training programmes:

• The Mary Seacole programme
  This is an eight-month leadership and management development programme designed to prepare aspiring and first time leaders for the demands of leadership in the healthcare system.
• The Management Essentials programme
  This is designed to improve the skills and confidence of recently appointed or first time managers.It consists of a programme of independent workshops (including managing teams, budgets and change etc.) that can be accessed as individual modules. The modules cover the main aspects of what it takes to manage individuals and teams.

We believe that where good team work exists, service user and staff experience will also be good.

The Learning and OD Team support teams to develop and improve their performance. We have skilled facilitators who can work alongside teams and their leaders to support their development. The team are also accredited to offer a number of team development diagnostic tools to support their work.

We also take a leading role in wider staff engagement. We help the organisation listen to and act on feedback from staff. We do this in a number of ways including through the yearly staff survey, the quarterly staff friends and family test and a number of other forums and opportunities which we call Your Voice Counts.

We were highly commended in a national awards programme for our staff engagement to develop our refresh Trust strategy.

The Andrew Sims Centre, part of Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, is a leading UK provider of continuing professional development (CPD) events for delegates across the country.

We have a varied programme of events which are open to anyone working within the field of Mental Health and are open to all delegates – psychiatrists, counsellors, mental health and learning disability nurses, care workers, support workers and many more, from both private practices and NHS organisations.

We offer a variety of CPD courses:

• Essentials & Masterclasses
• Workshops/ Conferences
• Mental Health Law
• Event Management services

You can view a selection of our courses on our website.