Looking to a capable future workforce

With attracting young talent into healthcare engineering roles increasingly important as the ageing profile of many estates teams sees experienced personnel with valuable expertise to pass on near retirement, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on the different, but equally successful, approaches to engineering apprenticeships of a scheme for NHS Trusts in north-east England, a leading building services engineering consultancy, and Essentia, the in-house provider of non-clinical healthcare services at London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. 

In the past, as many IHEEM members who cut their teeth in this ‘traditional’ way will recount, one of the main entry routes to a healthcare engineering career was to join an NHS Trust as an apprentice engineer. Working with colleagues with a wealth of skills and expertise to impart, such apprentices found themselves in an excellent environment to gain the experience and knowledge needed to give them the best possible start to their career, and indeed many subsequently progressed to become healthcare engineering or estates managers or directors. 

Prior to 1972, explained Eileen Bayles, regional estates training and development manager for the Northern & Yorkshire NHS Assessment Centre – which co-ordinates and manages the recruitment and subsequent apprenticeship of NHS hospital engineers across a sizeable part of northern England – senior hospital engineers tended to recruit or train engineering craft apprentices ad hoc to meet particular needs. However, for many years the training was not formalised, or necessarily undertaken to recognised standards.