Improving support and training at Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust
Poor national training survey results in 2021, and worrying feedback from acute and general medicine trainees, including concerns around teamwork, working environments and workloads, as well as rota issues and a lack of inter-departmental and senior support, caused NHS England to intervene.
Survey data allowed NHS England to explore concerns in more detail as part of a quality visit to the trust, as well as enabling the trust to prioritise areas to focus on.
What action was taken?
The trust carried out several measures to address different areas of concern, including:
- Addressing workforce shortages, including appointing locally employed doctors and creating extra shifts.
- Enhancing education by introducing a ‘buddy system’, as well as structured inductions including a digitalised induction programme.
- Reconfiguring SDEC (Same Day Emergency Care) by separating patient flow to simplify workloads.
- Improving wellbeing, including appointing a wellbeing champion, holding wellbeing clinics, wellbeing services and drop-in services.
- Restructuring the out of hours working structure including formalising responsibilities, more structured handovers and a reduction of on call frequency.
- The creation of a new digital platform to improve access to learning resources.
What was the outcome?
At a follow up NHS England visit, resident doctors were very positive about their training and education experiences, and they felt valued and listened to. Educators shared experiences of having appropriate job roles, and time for training and opportunities for educational events.
Improvements were also shown in subsequent national training survey results. In 2024 and 2025 the trust was within the national average range of scores for all indicators, and scored above the national average for local teaching in 2025.
