The life of a radiotherapy education lead: Q&A with Sarah Hind

It is quite a unique role. Basically, I’m responsible for all aspects of education within the radiotherapy service, which includes workforce expansion, staff development, students and apprentices, setting department education strategy and standards, ensuring highest standards for technical practice and high-quality education. I also have to ensure that, obviously, we have high standards of patient care and technical practice at all times.

I advise and consult on any educational issues, working closely with colleagues from medical physics, the medical team, other management staff, radiotherapy staff, RTS and physics to create multi-disciplinary educational opportunities.

I’m also a radiotherapy manager – it’s kind of a dual role. I have some responsibility in terms of the day-to-day management of the department. That includes looking after any staffing issues – all of that sort of thing. But day to day is the development of our education programme.

We have 46 learners in total at the moment. I keep an eye on their progress and put things in place to help them, especially the apprentices. The apprenticeship is new to us in Leeds – we are in our second year of apprentices, so we’re still really developing that programme pathway. I make changes quite regularly. We’ve created a competency portfolio document for them, and a clinical assessment form, so that we can observe them working clinically.

I also manage the three members of the education team. I manage them on a daily basis and ensure they are looking after the students and apprentices.

This year, we’ll be doing our first annual CPD day on 7 November. It’s going to be between the radiotherapy technology services team, medical physics and the radiographers. We’re going to have an afternoon where we’re not treating any patients; the department will be closed and we’ll be focusing on CPD opportunities for staff members and bringing in external speakers to discuss hot topics, and just give staff the opportunity to see what’s going on within the department. Our advanced practitioners will be presenting on work they’re doing and any sort of key educational opportunities we think might be really useful on that day. We hope to do that every year from now on.

I do a lot of promotional work as well. Promoting radiotherapy to schools, attending careers fairs and trying to create promotional material that we can use in that respect. I organise and run our annual open day for potential students. And again, that’s multi-disciplinary across all the professions that are involved in radiotherapy.

I think it’s really important because one of the things that we’ve noticed the most is retention. Before I started in this role, we lost both of our apprentices who were in their first year. We had almost a 100 per cent drop-out rate. And since I’ve been in post, we’re now going into our third round of recruitment and we’ve not lost any of our apprentices. So that’s obviously really good. Retaining staff members as well – I think our numbers this year are really low in terms of employees we’ve lost. And I think that can be attributed a little to the support that we’re able to give in terms of education, CPD opportunities and staff morale – things like that.

I think it’s critical that we provide high-quality education to our learners in the department, and whether that’s our students or our apprentices, or even our staff, things change really quickly. There are lots of technological advances within radiotherapy. Actually having someone who is able to manage that and ensure training is happening and that staff are receiving that training and that they're comfortable and that we’re moving along – that’s really important.

Education is key to any NHS service. It is a constant requirement for all staff and, without dedicated education support, you cannot support either your new or established staff. All departments need an education lead who has dedicated, protected time to support and develop staff and students.