At St. Helens & Knowsley, we see it as being that we cannot manage our future employment requirements without looking at employing from non traditional routes. The Cadet Scheme forms part of that. We're also looking at creating a Youth Learning Zone, so that we're starting to encourage the youngsters of St. Helens & Knowsley to think about the various types of jobs that they could have within the Health sector. If we didn't have it here in this area, without the support from the NHS Academy on Merseyside, we would really be struggling to look at our future employment opportunities. We'd be struggling, as many other trusts are, to find people who do think about this as being an employer of choice. So this is a critical part of our recruitment plans for the future.

One of the things that's really important for our trust, at St. Helens & Knowsley, is that we look at ways that we recruit and retain employees. We want to make sure that, as we employ the cadets on a rotation basis, that we're able to give them a good experience ... that they then say "That's the place I want to work in the future". And then, once they come to work for us, they also want to stay working for us, rather than going elsewhere.

St. Helens & Knowsley Hospitals Trust gets involved with the Cadet Scheme as part of the NHS Academy. We link in with the colleges – St. Helen's College and Knowsley College – where they train up the cadets. And the cadets then come here and have work experience, so that they're having some real life experiences to be able to apply their learning.

Key Skills are incredibly important for the hospital. One of the things that we do hear from patients about things that they like improving, or the continual improvement from the hospital, is around communications. So, obviously, as a Key Skill, that is critical ... to make sure when the cadets are coming in, they already have some understanding of communications. And also in their future career, they can think back to the learning that they gained as a cadet and carry on using their good communication skills. On the other side of it, there's Key Skills around maths as well. There are so many ways that maths comes into our daily lives at work, so it's useful for cadets to be making sure that they're developing their Key Skills around maths as well.

It's a huge advantage to us that, when we're working with the cadets and then when they come on afterwards to be employees of ours, that they come along with skills that we have led as they've gone through their training. The employer led approach is something that is so critical to making sure that we do get future employees who are ready for employment.

At St. Helens & Knowsley Hospital Trust we're in a position where, because we're having a new build, we're looking to the future and we know that we're going to have to increase the number of employees that we bring into the hospital. We're not going to be able to gain all of those extra employees through traditional routes, so we have to look at alternative ways to employ people. One of the best ways of doing that is starting to look at the community that the hospital is based in, and look at the skills that we have amongst the youngsters who are growing up, both in terms of what we can do with them whilst they're still at school, but also as they leave school. How can we be helping to provide them with real life learning experiences? How we can link in with Apprenticeship schemes, such as the Cadet Programme to be able to provide ourselves with future nurses and, obviously, other allied health professions as well?