To help raise awareness of careers available in primary care, the GP Care Group’s Training Hub organised our first-ever Primary Care Careers Fair earlier this month. The aim of the event was to help the public understand roles within health and care and give people a chance to discuss opportunities and get first-hand career advice from healthcare professionals. The team also wanted to encourage engagement with universities offering programmes to support roles in primary care, and much more.
We spoke with the Training Hub’s Widening Participation Project Manager, Farduse Islam to get an insight into what happened on the day. Read on to hear what she said.
It was important for the team to encourage the public to consider working in healthcare and inform them of career opportunities in primary care, the different opportunities and degree apprenticeships the Care Group offers, and training available.
To reach a younger demographic we targeted schools and youth centres. This was mainly so the team could approach young people who were thinking about pursuing a career in healthcare. We wanted to open their perspective about the different opportunities in health care as a lot of young people aren’t aware of the the various career pathways available. Another audience we targeted were those seeking employment through their local Job Centre, as a way of encouraging people to apply for current vacancies advertised at the fair.
We wanted to represent all the roles we had in primary care and the GP Care Group to the best we could. Luckily were able to have the following professionals attend:
We were pleased with the turnout of the fair with school-aged children coming along and asking a lot of questions about careers and networking with professionals at the fair. It’s important to get young people to think early about their careers so we were delighted to see many engaged in the event. The general public also attended in the afternoon seeking more information about careers in healthcare. These attendees were more interested in the vacancies available.
The fair overall was a great success with a lot of positive feedback from visitors who said they were looking forward to the next event and enquired about future dates. School students voiced that they’d tell other schools about how valuable and interesting the fair was to them as I got them thinking about their future career choices. Although we didn’t have a high percentage of Schools attend, those that did attend asked us why other schools haven’t taken advantage of the fair.
As this was the Care Group’s first Primary Care Careers Fair, we have taken away some ways we can improve upcoming fairs. From the feedback we received, we learned that people wanted more variety of clinical and non-clinical in the jobs being advertised. The team’s takeaway from this is to advertise more broadly to existing staff about clinical roles and make it clear through marketing and general discussions that people with non-healthcare backgrounds are encouraged to apply for roles within the Care Group now and in the future.
