Apprenticeships offer a powerful route to develop confident, compassionate, and future-ready staff — helping to embed personalised care, improve team culture, and support recovery and retention across the system. Whether your focus is clinical leadership, staff wellbeing, or service transformation, apprenticeships can help you build the capacity and resilience your teams need.
In Secondary Care, apprenticeships bring together structured learning and real-time application within fast-paced clinical settings. Whether supporting coaching conversations, enhancing patient engagement, or improving team supervision, the learning is designed to be practical and embedded in everyday work.
Apprenticeships help embed personalised, compassionate care into clinical culture.
Understanding the Secondary Care Context
We understand that Secondary Care operates in fast-paced, high-pressure environments, often focused on clinical outcomes, efficiency, and flow. Professionals in hospitals and acute settings work hard to deliver high-quality care under significant time and resource pressures. In this climate, person-centred and relational approaches can feel deprioritised, with limited space for reflective or coaching-based development. As systems shift toward integration and prevention, embedding coaching, compassionate leadership, and wellbeing practices into secondary care is more important than ever.
The Increasing Importance of Integration
Clinical expertise is a strength in secondary care — but integrating coaching conversations, personalised care, and reflection can strengthen outcomes for patients, teams, and systems. For these approaches to succeed, training must be practical and work within the realities of busy, acute settings. There is growing recognition that focusing on the human side of care — through coaching and relational leadership — helps reduce burnout, retain staff, and improve quality.
Current Challenges in Practice
Despite this shift, many challenges persist. Staff face emotional fatigue, high turnover, and constant pressure. Time for reflection and development is rare, and leadership support is often inconsistent or unavailable. While professionals value structured development, access to training that is flexible, relevant, and grounded in practice is limited. Addressing these barriers is key to building a resilient, compassionate workforce.
Workforce Development Priorities
To meet these needs, workforce development in secondary care should focus on:
- Equipping clinical leaders and managers with relational, coaching-based leadership skills
- Embedding coaching conversations into clinical practice and supervision
- Enhancing team culture, peer learning, and reflective practices
- Supporting staff to build resilience, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness
- Offering training that is flexible, applied, and context-sensitive
Our Experience
TPC Health has worked across NHS Trusts to support clinical teams, senior managers, and professional educators in embedding coaching and personalised care in secondary care settings. For example:
- We’ve designed and delivered clinical and operational leadership programmes for doctors, nurses, AHPs and operational managers, supporting them to lead with compassion and clarity.
- We’ve trained thousands of secondary care practitioners to use coaching in how they manage their teams and how they work with patients.
- We’ve worked with medical education departments to integrate coaching into clinical supervision, mentoring, and appraisal processes.
- We’ve supported organisational change through bespoke programmes focused on culture, communication, and team-based care.
- We have delivered practical training on how to incorporate coaching into care planning, shared decision-making, and workforce wellbeing strategies.
We understand the context, pressures, and dynamics of secondary care. Our apprenticeships are designed to support professionals to lead with empathy, think reflectively, and build stronger, safer, and more person-centred services — even in the most complex environments.
Roles our Apprenticeships are most suitable for
The Level 3 Community Health and Wellbeing Worker Apprenticeship:
- Patient-experience or engagement officers
- Ward-based activities / therapy assistants (OT, physio, arts)
- Healthcare support workers (especially in frailty, dementia, mental-health, paediatrics)
- Discharge or transfer-of-care navigators
- Hospital smoking-cessation or weight-management advisers
- Peer-support or lived-experience workers
- Surgical Pre-habilitation Coach
- Virtual-Ward Transition Coach
The Level 5 Coaching Professional Apprenticeship:
- Ward or service managers who coach multidisciplinary teams
- Clinical nurse specialists mentoring junior staff
- Senior AHPs (OTs, physios) leading rehab teams
- Practice-education facilitators and preceptorship leads
- Psychologists/therapists supervising recovery-college staff
- Digital Discharge & Recovery Coach