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A bright future ahead for former healthcare students
In 2025, we welcomed our first T Level students on placement from Wakefield College and Kirklees College.
This year, after completing their course, 12 of the students returned as healthcare support workers and are continuing their journey in the NHS.
Our Professional Development and Education Unit (PDEU) has a long history of working collaboratively with Wakefield College and Kirklees College, successfully running apprenticeship programmes for support workers. The T Level placements build on this work and reinforce our commitment to supporting the next generation of healthcare professionals.
All our healthcare support workers start with three weeks in our Health Care Academy at Dewsbury District Hospital, where they complete the Care Certificate. This covers 16 standards that health and care professionals follow every day, as well as the essential knowledge and skills needed to provide safe, high-quality and compassionate care.
We caught up with Maddie, Abby, Nancy and Aissa as they approached the end of their time in the academy, before heading out into their clinical areas.
Aissa will initially be based on Gate 43, Acute Elderly Care, at Pinderfields. In the long term, she would like to train to become a nursing associate and then a paediatric nurse. Nancy is based at our Pontefract site and is looking forward to joining the orthopaedic team. She’s not sure what she wants to do in the future and is waiting to see what piques her interest.
Abby is also interested in the nursing associate route and will be caring for our elderly patients on Gate 42. Maddie will be joining our Integrated Care Team, based out in the community, and would like to work her way up to becoming a nurse.
We also work closely with New College Pontefract, offering their BTEC health students a guaranteed interview for a healthcare support worker role, and this year we’ve offered permanent roles to eight of their students. We wish everyone well as they start their new positions.
This year, we will be taking students from Outwood Grange Academy and Outwood Academy Hemsworth, which is a new partnership for the Trust.
In total, we will have 52 first-year T Level students starting their placements with us in January 2027, alongside BTEC Level 3 Healthcare students from Kirklees College and Wakefield College.