OAHP Priority: Develop the workforce through education and training.
In 2021, OAHP funded 28 career development awards to staff and students across the five partners. Up to a maximum of £1,500, these awards funded conference attendance, training and educational visits or team days.
A number of the recipients provided reports on how the award funding was used – for example, the Bond Vascular Unit thank you letter stated ….
‘The away-day gave some much needed breathing space as well as an opportunity to meet with clinicians that use the service. We were lucky to have favourable access to St Catherine’s College which is an excellent venue for such a meeting. The day started with an informal, historical recap of how the service started and has since evolved, reviewing the significant achievements and progress made over the few years prior to Covid, including modernisation, increase in patient activity, research, and education.
It was a hugely beneficial day of learning, planning and team building.’
The Specialist Surgery Directorate’s award provided for books for the dental nursing team, other learning materials and for a number of individual nurses to attend a specialist conference. Full details are available in the following: Culligan RE_ OAHP Charity Awards 2021
Mary Miller, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, received an award to support her attendance at the McGill Palliative Care Congress in Canada in 2022. Her report follows: Mary Miller Canadian report.
Yuhan Zhang, Advanced Nurse Practitioner in Virtual Ward, John Radcliffe received funding for the first year of the Doctorate of Nursing at Oxford Brookes. She concludes her report Yuhan Zhang progress report by saying:
I am very grateful and humbled by this award. It helped me enormously in 2021 to ease the financial burden of me and my family and enable me to pursue my research dream and aspiration. This knowledge and insight gained by completing my first year of doctorate of nursing, not only transformed my understanding of nursing as a discipline, as an art form and science, but also transformed my clinical practice which directly affects my decisions relating to patient care and the quality of care.
Consultant Psychiatrist, Howard Ryland’s Award enabled him to:
complete the Master’s level module CTM102 Basic Statistics for Clinical Trials as part of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s MSc course Clinical Trials by Distance Learning. This was a comprehensive introduction to the statistical processes needed to analyse the results of clinical trials. I was able to successfully complete the module, achieving the highest possible score of 5 in the exams conducted in June 2022. I now plan to go on to complete the rest of the Master’s course in clinical trials.
Ultimately, I hope to use this to lead clinical trials in forensic and other psychiatric settings to evaluate new treatment approaches that could benefit patients. I have secured funding from the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) for two days a week of my time for the next three years to further build my academic skills and experience. I aspire to become a clinical academic forensic psychiatrist who is able to leverage my research skills to improve the outcomes and experiences of my patients. The OAHP award has supported me in a crucial step in this journey.