Creating a new NHS England

Health Education England (HEE) will be coming together with NHS England (NHSE) to create a new organisation on 1 April 2023. This means that the new NHS England will take responsibility for HEE’s current activities. This includes planning, recruiting, educating and training the health workforce; ensuring that the healthcare workforce has the people, skills, values and behaviours to deliver excellent healthcare and health improvement to patients and the public.

The new NHS England will reduce current duplication and bring the NHS’s people, skills, digital, data and technology expertise together into one organisation. The new organisation will be smaller than the sum of its predecessor organisations meaning fewer people will work for it. This means a smaller, leaner national centre ensuring our functions are delivered at the right level, with the new NHS England only doing what it is best placed to do.

Within the new organisation there will be a new national Workforce, Education and Training Directorate in the new NHS England, which Dr Navina Evans will lead from 1 April as Chief Workforce, Training and Education Officer. As with HEE before it, the new Directorate’s statutory responsibility remains to ensure the NHS in England has a sufficient supply of qualified staff. This workforce must also be inclusive and have the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver compassionate high-quality health and care. To help achieve this we will mainstream equalities, diversity and inclusion into every team, function and role to help secure better staff experience, better performance and improved outcomes for our citizens.

This is a challenging time for people affected by this change. HEE and the new NHSE are supporting colleagues across the organisations while at the same time listening to feedback from partners, trainers and trainees as we design this new organisation.