The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) faces increasing pressures to deliver higher quality service and care with diminishing budgets and cost-saving requirements year-on-year. This research explores attitudes towards models of professional development among NHS educators and the levels of engagement of individuals in their professional learning. Many qualified educators working in non-standard education settings such as the NHS see themselves as teachers whose subject specialism is the discipline and practice of Education. No more, no less. While others regard themselves as ‘dual professionals,’ for example, clinicians who also teach. A consequence of this is often that the engagement in professional learning and CPD of NHS staff who teach can differ in remarkably diverse ways and to varying degrees. Through personal accounts gathered by conducting individual qualitative interviews, and a collection of documented narrative accounts, the research addresses the ways in which professionals in the NHS in roles like mine attribute value and purpose to their own professional learning and CPD activity in this context. It also considers the ways these individuals make sense of their professional practice as both educators and subject specialists. Finally, this research offers insights into where responsibility is currently seen to reside in relation to professional learning and the provision of CPD: with the individual, the employer or both. The findings of this research contribute to discussions around the value of educational practice in NHS organisations, as reported by managerial teams and by the practitioners engaged in professional learning and development across the sector.

Authors:
Carrie Anne Walton, The University of Sunderland, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Carrie Anne Walton is a Senior Specialist Lead at NHS Education for Scotland. Her research interests are practice development and education as craft, non-standard educators. Her current project is the dissemination of findings from her PhD thesis.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrieannewalton/

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