Benefits
A stakeholder feedback evaluation in Autumn 2024 involving award recipients, their managers, and their academic mentors/supervisors identified a range of perceived benefits e.g.
Manager: ‘Sharing of learning across service and encouragement for others’
Mentor: ‘The Award holder (my mentee) went on to secure a competitive …. fellowship’
Recipient: ‘Improving quality of the work I do by developing research skills and involvement in the design and set up of projects’
Recipient: ‘Other colleagues found it inspiring that clinical academic career support is strong in lothian, may have helped job retention’
Improvements
Although the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, a few areas for improvement were mentioned:
- Some mentors requested opportunities for more communication with the Gateways team throughout the process. Hence, the team would like to invite any of the mentors and managers involved to meet up at any point before, during, or after the duration of an award, if they so wish. Contact details can be found below.
- One or two recipients mentioned that a little more clarity and structure to their placement objectives would have been helpful, without things becoming too rigid and prescriptive
Negotiating study leave
Study leave arrangements for the Gateway awards often go smoothly but are the most likely reason for a less than optimal experience/outcome. Balancing the priorities of recipient, service, and academic mentor/supervisor requires:
- Three-way negotiation
- Recognition of the demands on, and commitments/schedules of, the other parties in the negotiation, and that these can change over time
- A degree of regularity and predictability in arrangements coupled with scope for some flexibility where possible, to capitalise on ad hoc experience opportunities
Salary funding
Funds for the salary element of awards will be transferred internally to the recipient’s service cost centre from a cost centre within the R&D Office once the Contract of Agreement for the award has been signed off by all parties. This will usually occur in one or two payments. For recipients employed by a general practice a purchase order will be arranged and the practice will need to provide an invoice for this order.
For recipients who work part-time and choose to use their out-of-work time for their award, or study leave time cannot be negotiated within their normal part-time working hours, no salary-related funds will be transferred. The most common solution for part-time recipients is for the service and recipient to arrange a temporary increase in their contracted hours equivalent to the hours (and duration) provided by the award – in this case, funds will be transferred to the service as described above and the recipient will receive a temporary increase in their pay packet to reflect these additional hours. It is the responsibility of the recipient’s manager to ensure that this increase is recorded in eESS and SSTS so that the extra pay is processed by Payroll.
Backfill arrangements
Some, but not all, service managers involved in the scheme have been able to use the salary component of the award to finance a temporary increase in hours for another member of their team as backfill for the study leave taken by the recipient. Some have been able to use the staff bank to the same end.
Training pot
The individual training pot, available to First Steps into Research award recipients only, provides for up to a maximum of £500 per recipient for items such as conference and short course fees. Part contributions to the fees for opportunities which exceed £500 is possible. These training pot funds are not transferred to the recipient’s service. Recipients need to contact a member of the Gateways team if they wish to use some of these funds and, where agreed, the financial mechanisms will be explained.
The Gateways team:
Generic inbox – loth.gatewayawards@nhs.scot
Juliet MacArthur, Chief Nurse Research – juliet.macarthur@nhs.scot
Andy Peters, AHP Strategic Lead for Research and Development – andy.peters@nhs.scot
Elaine Rankine, Head of Pharmacy Education, Research and Development – elaine.rankine@nhs.scot
