John Burns is Head of Programme for the Social Care Directorate, NHS Education for Scotland
Reading time: 7 mins
As the new Head of Programme with NES, I’m delighted to introduce the Social Care Directorate and provide some reflections on my first couple of months in post.
The Social Care Directorate (SCD) is one of the newest Directorates in NES. The foundations of the Directorate have been laid over the last 12-18 months by our Director, Gordon Paterson, and Associate Director, Angella Fulton, supported by Theresa Savage, General Manager, and Ruth Reynolds, Executive Assistant. During this period the team have developed the strategic partnerships required for the SCD to make an impact across the sector, including Scottish Care, Health and Social Care Scotland, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) and the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland (CCPS) to name but a few. They have also provided input to various pieces of work across other NES Directorates, including Medical, NMAHP, NHSS Academy, Psychology and Workforce. A key piece of work has involved developing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) to underpin a portfolio of work which stands to have positive impacts across the sector.
The Directorate has grown in recent months with Michelle Morrison, Senior Educator (Unpaid Carers), and Ryan Watson, Business Support, joining from the NMAHP Directorate and continuing the development and delivery of the brilliant Equal Partners in Care (EPiC) resources for supporting unpaid carers.
More recently and all around the same time (March-May 2024), I joined the SCD as Head of Programme alongside Jeanette Clews and John Eden, both as Specialist Leads and Fiona Roberts as Senior Educator. John brings a strong track record of leadership across the third and independent sectors having worked as a charity CEO and latterly an independent sector lead with a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP). Jeanette has a breadth and depth of experience in employability, education and training and also experience of project management, having worked in NES’s PMO before joining the SCD. Fiona brings a range of experience in education having worked at Associate Dean level within a HEI combined with experience of leading service delivery as a physiotherapist in hospital settings and settings and as a rehabilitation coordinator in social care settings. My own experience involves working in various service delivery, strategic and leadership roles at local and national levels as well as experience in academia.
Collectively, the newly recruited team members bring a swathe of expertise and experience in social care delivery, co-ordination and management, local and national policy and strategy development, programme management, education and leadership across the health and social care sector. We are committed to the development of the social care workforce across the country.
As a Directorate we have been commissioned to undertake two main projects. The Workforce Development project involves working in collaboration with colleagues at SSSC to work on Career Pathways, an Integrated Health and Social Care SVQ and a National Induction Framework and Passporting.
The other commission, Repurposing of Turas Learn, involves working with stakeholders to ensure TURAS Learn content is accessible, applicable and of high quality for the social care workforce with the aim of supporting the social care sector to access high quality learning resources, Information on these commissions was shared at our recent presentation at Learning at Work Week. The session slides are available here with a TURAS login. The session underscored how the people of Scotland rely on the effective delivery of services from a workforce – including unpaid carers – who receive high quality learning, training and development opportunities from NES.
With good quality social care being so interdependent with health care and woven through the many disciplines and Directorates of NES, the SCD envisages continuing to grow and develop the already well-established relationships across NES.
I’ll conclude with a couple of reflections on my time here: I feel grateful for the opportunity to work with and for my team and Directorate – we are aligned on our purpose, and that of NES, and there’s a strong feeling of knowing what we hope to achieve and why, even if, understandably at this stage, there’s still a lot of work to do on the ‘how’.
There’s a lot going on. NES’s Executive Team are clearly committed to a programme of strategic change. In addition to the acronym soup this has cooked up, there’s a landscape that can be difficult to understand and navigate, particularly for a new-start but presumably for anyone who finds it a challenge to orienteer around and try to influence an emerging world. I’ve been reassured by the transparency, the congruence between rhetoric on values, purpose and actions and what appears to be a commitment to collaboration and inclusivity. There’s always a risk of a diffusion of responsibility when working this way but there feels like a collective responsibility, at a strategic level, for creating and driving change.
Which brings me to my final reflections and a (not so) rhetorical question – one which I know has been asked before but nevertheless remains pertinent – and which was sparked by a conversation with someone who was talking about resistance to change in their workplace. Everyone’s so busy with ‘the day job’ that they can’t get their head up to see the need for change (or continuous improvement) – and, ironically, how that change stands to help them with the day job. For any organisation embarking upon the opportunities NES hopes to realise, this is likely something which will continue to be wrestled with.
The question then is: How do we support each other and colleagues across the system to consider change as a critical part of the day job? To not see it as someone else’s responsibility, but that we all share a responsibility to drive and support change.
With one aspect of leadership being about taking care of those in your charge – as opposed to taking charge – we have a collective responsibility to look out for each other and that includes seeking and providing support and constructive challenge in areas like this. Feedback is a cornerstone for continuous improvement within my team and when we solicit and provide it in the spirit of improvement, we take a small step to creating that broader cultural aim of ensuring change and improvement is continuous and business as usual, not a “nice to have”.
I hope you’ve found the detail useful regarding the Social Care Directorate and maybe my musings have sparked a thought or two for yourself. If you’d like to know more about the work of the SCD, you think there may be an as-yet-untapped opportunity for collaboration, or you’d like a chat about anything I’ve written, please don’t hesitate to contact me on John.burns10@nhs.scot
We’d like to thank John for providing this extended blog to spotlight the team, their work and the opportunity for collaboration.John has also published various journal articles which can be found on ResearchGate
Head of Programme, Social Care Directorate, NHS Education for Scotland
John Burns is Head of Programme for the Social Care Directorate. John has over 20yrs experience working in various roles including: learning disability service provision in the third sector; social care support in children and families and adult services for a Local Authority; strategic roles as Alcohol and Drug Partnership Policy Officer and then as Evaluation Lead for a Health and Social Care Partnership before managing Strategy, Transformation and Health Improvement in an HSCP. John has also worked in education as an Associate Lecturer for University of West of Scotland having also studied there for an MSc and completed a PhD at Stirling University in 2020. John has published various journal articles which can be found on ResearchGate
John enjoys playing football the odd evening and at weekends but is more likely to be found behind the wheel of his car, sharing taxi duties with his wife as they ferry their 8yr old daughter to her various clubs.
All information regarding our contributors was correct at the time of publishing.
John Burns, Head of Programme for Social Care Directorate in NES shares an introduction to the team and the commission that they are committed to.
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