Sue Ryder has multiple clinical services offering palliative, neurological and bereavement care. The strategic aim is to create a standardised clinical induction and education and training programme, promoting a multi-professional approach and utilising blended learning methods (Sue Ryder. Clinical Education Strategy and Framework 2021–2024); ensuring the clinical workforce receives a robust, standardised, and relevant clinical induction. One challenge facing national organisations is providing a consistent local induction, across a disparate clinical workforce.

Induction offers benefits including welcoming and orientating staff to the organisation, opportunities to undertake role-relevant training, that will contribute to safe, effective, and efficient performance. Ensuring excellence in clinical practice facilitates the delivery of safe and effective care, simultaneously addressing nationally-recognised workforce and retention issues. The quality and governance perspective supports the importance of induction.

A quality assurance approach to development was used to create a new robust and standardised national clinical induction programme across the healthcare workforce.

This project focuses on the development and creation of a national resource for Sue Ryder’s clinical staff. This will be created centrally with the collaboration of stakeholders at local service level. The process involves scoping, mapping and designing the programme and resources, then piloting the induction locally. The project includes Sue Ryder hospices, neurological centres and bereavement services.

The Plan, Do Study, Act model of improvement is used along with other quality assurance methodologies including process mapping, brainstorming via stakeholder involvement (NHS. Quality, service improvement and redesign. 2020). This approach will allow the development of the induction programme and the creation of learning resources and processes which will be available to use to enable an initial pilot clinically based induction to be delivered. This will then be evaluated, and adjustments made as required prior to a full national roll out. The project demonstrates the importance of using a quality improvement methodology, collaborative working and highlights the value and importance of standardising induction.