The national development of the Clinical Associate in Psychology (CAP) degree apprenticeship, has won the Workforce Initiative of the Year Award at the Annual Health Service Journal Awards 2022
The NHS needs to increase the psychology workforce by 60 per cent by 2024. Yet in England in 2020 only 18 per cent of psychology graduates were accepted on to clinical psychology courses via traditional training routes. The CAP apprenticeship programme was created, with a vision to build a sizeable, sustainable, diverse psychology workforce representative of communities themselves.
The Workforce Initiative of the Year Award was presented to a consortium of NHS trusts for the development of the Clinical Associate in Psychology workforce.
The Award was in recognition of the CAP model of training, developing a sustainable and diverse psychology workforce for the NHS. On announcing the winner and presenting the Award the Judges commented that CAP represented ‘A very powerful and practical workforce initiative which hits the purpose of this award on the head’. The Judges also recognised that this collaborative workstream ‘has brought different professions together, from different providers, to find solutions to entrenched recruitment problems’.
As one of the CAP university partners developing locally sensitive training courses alongside strategic workforce plans, we hope that this national recognition of CAP can continue to strengthen and grow CAP across our regions and those area without access to CAPs and CAP training and that other NHS trusts look into recruiting Clinical Associate in Psychology apprenticeships to expand mental health provision in the NHS.