Health Education England is inviting applications from health care settings who are interested in becoming test sites for the new Nursing Associate role – an innovation that emerged from Shape of Caring Review (March 2015).

The role is designed to build capacity to care and capability to treat across the health and social care system. And, as the recent consultation demonstrated, there is a huge appetite for this new role which can provide a real benefit to the nursing and care workforce across a range of settings and play a key role in the delivery of patient care with safety at its heart.

HEE is seeking to identify strong partnerships between employers and education providers. The lead organisation in any partnership must be an employer allied to an STP footprint that will accept the funding allocation, and all partnership members will keep to the standard terms of the funding arrangement.

Successful organisations will become test sites and train a minimum of 20 students over two years starting from December 2016 and will fully participate in the monitoring and evaluation of the programme.

The six-week application window will close at 5pm on Wednesday 10 August.

Two webinars will also take place (13 July and 25 July) providing information on HEE recruitment process of test site partnerships – please do join and share your thoughts and insights.