The Leeds Health and Care Academy is the first of its kind in the UK, providing a unique opportunity for the city’s health and social care workforce to learn and work together across organisational boundaries.
As such, it is transforming the thinking, learning and culture across the city’s entire health and social care workforce in order to retain existing employees and attract new talent – including from some of the most diverse communities across the city.
With courses designed to respond and adapt to what the Leeds’ system needs, the Academy is therefore helping to plug skills gaps, balancing the city’s immediate priorities while addressing its future workforce requirements.
Much of its comprehensive portfolio of learning and development opportunities is available via its unique online Learning Portal.
The Leeds Health and Care Academy is inspiring and supporting more local people into the health and care sector via its unique online Career Compass Leeds, and the Leeds Health and Care Talent Hub. The Talent Hub particularly targets those in the city’s most disadvantaged communities. In this way, it is helping to ensure that the diversity of the city’s health and social care workforce better reflects that of the people it serves.
The Academy is at the heart of Leeds’ ‘one workforce’ approach for the city’s entire health and care sector. The one workforce approach involves partners working together to ensure Leeds has a well-trained, well-supported workforce at all levels and across all services, who are reflective of their local communities and who serve local people’s needs.
Alongside partners, the Academy has a number of Workforce Innovation Projects, including a Staff Portability Agreement that allows for sharing of staff across health and social care organisations in Leeds. This enables the sector to take a collective view of resourcing, and work together as a citywide group to respond to changing demand.
The Academy’s collaborative workforce planning uses analysis and insights, including research and evaluation of interventions, to support evidence-based workforce transformation across health and social care.
Leeds Health and Care Academy partners include Leeds City Council, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Leeds and York Partnership Foundation Trust and NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, Leeds Academic Health Partnership, Forum Central, Leeds GP Confederation, University of Leeds, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds Trinity University, Leeds Care Association and Leeds City College.
