Welcome to the KSS enhancing generalist skills website. This front page gives you a brief outline of the programme and why it is important. Once you have read this, we recommend taking a look around the rest of the site. It covers the programme contents in more detail and contains all the resources and information you need to get started.
Contents:
What is enhancing generalist skills?
How is enhance relevant to Kent, Surrey and Sussex?
What does the programme cover?
What is enhancing generalist skills?
NHS England’s enhance programme is a postgraduate medical education offering available to everyone who works for the health service in England. It was inspired by key findings from the Future Doctor report and NHS long term workforce plan, both of which recognised the need to equip healthcare professionals with the skills to navigate our increasingly complex healthcare system.
Enhance will support you to develop attitudes, skills and behaviours that will be beneficial to your clinical work and specialty job applications. Completing the enhance programme also provides evidence of meeting the more holistic elements of your curriculum, as well as a contextual leadership certification.
Enhance has been piloted by seven trailblazer sites across the UK. Each site has used a wide variety of tools, from virtual reality to sustainability field trips, to deliver the programme. You can watch some videos about the work these sites have done here.
Why is enhance important?
The enhance programme was created to improve generalist skills in UK healthcare workers. Generalism in this context means taking a holistic approach to the health and wellbeing of both individuals and entire populations.
Our healthcare system has become increasingly complex. This can often cause fragmented and disjointed care. As well as being inconvenient for the patient, it also increases the chances of error, waste and duplication of care.
By improving generalist skills, enhance will help you feel more confident managing care across multiple overlapping physical and mental health services. It will equip you with the skills to bridge organisational boundaries, work better in multi-professional teams, and provide more person-centred care.
Enhance also aims to give you a greater understanding of social justice and the environment, and how these play a crucial role in practicing modern medicine.
How is enhance relevant to Kent, Surrey and Sussex?
KSS as a region is highly varied and each area faces many healthcare challenges. As healthcare professionals we are often expected to move around the region, meaning we may experience a wider range of issues than those working in other areas.
Coastal areas experience disproportionate levels of deprivation and inequality nationally. This is particularly true in KSS, where we have over 300km of coastline. These areas have more ageing and deprived communities than the national average. This is most striking in Hastings, where almost half of the town’s residents live in areas ranked in the 20% most deprived areas of England. The twenty most deprived areas of Kent are all by the coast and 18% of children in Thanet are currently living in poverty.
Despite these figures, our coastal areas have fewer healthcare professionals per patient. Access to healthcare can often be challenging more generally, with many individuals having to travel to multiple centres to access specialist services.
One of the other major healthcare challenges in our region is our ageing population. Our populations are older than the national average. In Surrey, 1 in 5 residents are now over 65. In the next ten years, Sussex expects its population of over 85’s to rise by 25%. Whilst many individuals can live healthily into later life, older people are disproportionately affected by multimorbidity and use healthcare services more than their younger counterparts.
Some areas have their own specific issues. Brighton and Hove has the highest rate of HIV per head of population in the South East of England. It also has a much higher prevalence of drug misuse than the national average, with the 9th highest rate of death from overdose in the UK. Surrey has the fourth highest population of Gypsy, Roma and traveller residents of any local authority. Delivering good quality healthcare for these populations can be extremely challenging.
Understanding these differences, and how to navigate them, is essential to practice medicine effectively in our region. We hope that by helping you to understand these issues, we can create a healthcare system that is truly responsive to the needs of the people we serve. We hope that you choose to explore some of these issues, or any others that you find are relevant, during your enhance work.
How is enhance delivered?
There are two enhance programmes, enhance enable and enhance explore:
- Enable is a self-directed programme that uses a workbook. Trainees get a certificate for each module they complete from the national enhance team.
- Explore is a bespoke programme which includes protected time for generalist and community placement activities. These will be piloted in Kent for foundation trainees in the 2024-25 intake and will be applied for via Horus.
Enhance is an outcomes-based programme. It allows individuals to work at their own pace and to use a variety of methods to fulfil the curriculum items. Its scope has been left deliberately broad to allow trainees to explore areas they feel are important that are relevant to where they practice.
What does the programme cover?
The enhance programme covers the six domains outlined above. These domains are divided into six modules. Each of these has a workbook, which outlines the learning objectives and themes of the module.
Enhance encourages you to use a variety of methods to complete each module. This could be anything from e-learning, to shadowing other healthcare professionals, to more creative methods like reading memoirs or novels that explore patient experience.
There are also four ‘cross-cutting themes’ on the enhance programme. Whilst these do not have their own modules, the workbooks all touch upon these in various ways. These cross-cutting themes are outlined below.
Who can complete enhance?
Enhance is open to anyone who works for NHS England, in a clinical or non- clinical role. The programme aligns with the Foundation Curriculum, meaning in KSS we have initially focussed on rolling out enhance for this group. However, the resources on this website are relevant to anyone, and we welcome everyone who is interested to give the programme a go.
In the future, we hope to offer programmes tailored to more senior doctors and other healthcare professionals.
How do I sign up?
You don’t need to! Enhance enable is entirely self-guided. You can start working on it whenever you like, and you do not need to register. We do recommend that you let your educational supervisor know, as they will be responsible for signing you off. If they have any questions then direct them to this website, there is a whole section for supervisors that explains the process in detail.
How do I get signed off?
There is a section of the website that outlines this in plenty of detail here. If you are a foundation supervisor looking for more information you can find a dedicated page for them here.
Where can I find out more?
This website should provide all the information you need. Just select the relevant page from the menu bar. The national enhance website also contains lots of useful information and can be found here.