What is Enhancing Generalist Skills?
NHS England’s enhance programme is a postgraduate medical education offer that aligns with the Foundation Curriculum.
Inspired by key findings from the Future Doctor report and highlighted in the recent NHS Long term Workforce Plan – the programme equips healthcare professionals with enhanced generalist skills based on a peer reviewed syllabus, supported by learner and educator resources.
Enhance can support you to develop attitudes, skills and behaviours that will be beneficial and transferable for both future clinical work and specialty job applications.
Completing the enhance programme also provides evidence of meeting the holistic element of the Foundation Curriculum as well as a Contextual Leadership certification.
The Enhance programme is available to all Foundation doctors from August 2023.
The HEE Enhance website contains further information about the programme here:
What does Enhance aim to do?
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.
Why is enhance important?
Our current system risks 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 healthcare professionals feel more confident at managing complex care across multiple overlapping physical and mental health services. It will equip clinicians to bridge organisational boundaries, work better in multi-professional teams, and provide more person-centred care.
Enhance also aims to give practitioners a greater understanding of social justice and the environment, and how these play a crucial role in practicing modern medicine.
How is the enhance programme delivered?
There are two enhance programmes, enhance Enable and enhance Explore:
- Enable – self-directed learning using the enhance workbook. As part of enable you will get a certification of completion for each module that you complete from the national enhance team.
- Explore – bespoke programmes which include protected time for generalist and community placement activities.
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 areas to align the programme with their local priorities.
The Enhance Enable workbook is available here on NHS LearningHub (OpenAthens login needed)
What does the programme cover?
The six domains of Enhance are:
The programme covers six domains in total. Each domain has a small number of outcomes which informs the subjects that will be covered. Each domain can be delivered in a variety of ways, such as formal teaching, self-directed learning, quality improvement projects, and shadowing other professionals. They can also be evidenced using reflection on experiences in day-to-day clinical practice.
There are four ‘cross cutting themes’ which are present in all the domains. All work will touch upon these themes in some way.
The four cross-cutting themes are:
The Four cross cutting themes are outlined here:
What is being done nationally?
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:
What are we doing locally in OFS?
We will be focussing on delivering the Enhance Enable programme to our foundation doctors across each of our Trusts as pilot sites. In future, the Enhance Explore will be offered for some foundation doctors.
The National Foundation Lead for Enhance, Helen Johnson, talks more about the programme for FY1s/FY2s here: