London Ambulance Service

Facing critical workforce shortages and limited career entry points, London Ambulance Service developed an apprenticeship scheme designed to both remove barriers to paramedic careers and ensure its workforce was more representative of the community it serves. 

With only 5 per cent of paramedics from ethnically diverse communities and the NHS facing a national paramedic crisis borne of recruitment challenges, an overreliance on overseas professionals and a lack of accessible pathways, the service recognised a critical need to find a new way of widening access to paramedic careers. 

In response, it developed a new structured career pathway allowing candidates to train, qualify and earn, thereby enabling people who might never have considered a career in healthcare, and/or for whom the more traditional route might have been financially or academically inaccessible, to become much-needed paramedics. Now, trainees can access three new potential pathways: level 3 assistant ambulance practitioner (13 months), level 4 emergency medical technician (15 months) and level 6 paramedic (two years).

Beyond recruitment, retention in frontline roles had also been a persistent challenge, with high levels of burnout, lack of career progression and limited support structures historically leading to high turnover rates. But this new model, together with the Our LAS Inclusive Response Programme, an employability initiative designed to empower individuals from diverse and marginalised communities to consider frontline roles, “flips that narrative”, the service says. 

Now, with attrition rates under 8 per cent, London Ambulance Service has one of the lowest staff turnovers in the NHS, with 90 per cent of apprentices successfully completing their end point assessments, “significantly outperforming national standards”. 

The PMA judges hailed the scheme’s “impressive delivery structure” and said it “stood out from the crowd because of the strength of its outreach programme”. 

“It was great to hear how they are using the internal expertise of on-the-ground practitioners – providing them with teaching qualifications – to enable the transfer of industry knowledge and hands-on expertise to the apprentices, and their impressive data on reduced attrition and elimination of overseas recruitment, as well as their excellent learner achievement metrics,” they said.