The Florence Nightingale Fellowship award travel scholarships to nurses and midwives to travel and learn about nursing in other countries/cultures. My 2017 scholarship took me to Canada and I visited four cities in two provinces to explore their nursing education and nursing roles. I visited education institutes, care homes, hospitals, nursing agencies and hospices and undertook shadowing a community palliative care team.

As a result of this fantastic experience I have made connections with a hospice in Toronto and we have hosted a visit to our hospice from their care team so we can share learning and experiences. We have also hosted a nurse lecturer from Ottawa who visited us to see how palliative and end of life care is supported in our healthcare system.

This scholarship allowed me to consider the nursing workforce challenges; recruitment, retention and morale. Learning about nursing education from others can help us consider how we support the nursing workforce to transform career opportunities from apprentice to advanced and consultant level nurses in hospice care.

Our hospice is currently developing talent management and a pipeline of nurses:

• Supported care assistants using apprenticeship standards to start their career

• Supporting four Trainee Nursing Associates who are due to graduate in January 2019

• Undertaking an organisational workforce plan, which is supported by us completing functional mapping with teams to identify current and future skills required to deliver services; in turn identify gaps so we can educate, train and upskill to meet gaps

• Working with our Sustainability and Transformation Plan partners across our system to be part of a talent management and workforce planning solution.

This work can be showcased to demonstrate how working in a system and with partners will support workforce development to transform care.