**AI-Enabled Mobile & VR Platform to Scale NHS Maternity Workforce Training** This project explores how artificial intelligence (AI) can improve workforce training for NHS maternity staff; helping to address national concerns about maternal safety. NHS England mandate all midwives to complete eight days of training every year through the 'Core Competency Framework', but most NHS trusts struggle to deliver this due to funding pressures, rota gaps and limited trainer capacity. Traditional classroom-based training is difficult to scale and often disruptive to clinical services. Upskill.Health has developed a mobile and virtual reality (VR) training platform that allows staff to complete "bitesize" learning, such as emergency simulations and clinical refreshers, while remaining on the ward. Early prototypes have been tested in partnership with NHS midwives across 3 x NHS hospitals, with a pilot study launching in the coming weeks. Whilst feedback has been positive, it's clear from our future customers that we need to find additional ways to deliver 'personalised' training, suited to individuals' engagement and performance, as well as communication and soft skills training, prior to scale out. This technical feasibility study aims to assess the applicability of generative AI technologies to enable us to achieve this. We will focus on: * Creating realistic digital role-play experiences, where midwives can practice communication skills through conversational simulation with digital avatars trained on real women's stories. * Delivering personalised, adaptive learning, based on each user's experience level and performance. The work will involve technical development, real-world user testing and an evaluation of the system's safety, effectiveness and equity. The AI features will be co-designed with women, midwives and academic experts to ensure they are inclusive, trauma-informed and clinically relevant. The project is being delivered by Upskill.Health's core team, with support from Coventry & Warwickshire's Integrated Care Board, the 3 x local NHS trusts and academic collaborators at Coventry University. If successful, this innovation could help NHS trusts deliver safer, more efficient and more personalised training; supporting staff development while keeping more clinicians on the ward. It could also open the door to further applications across emergency care, women's health and international healthcare systems.

**Virtual Reality (VR) for Emergency Maternity Skills Training in Coventry & Warwickshire** **The Need:** The NHS, under ever increasing strain is on the cusp of unprecedented change. Despite a committed workforce, high profile failings have made the headlines in recent years, with lack of skilled staff a common feature. The 'NHS Long Term Workforce Plan', published earlier this year, makes it clear that we need to train more people, more quickly than ever before. but there is concern about how to deliver change at such scale. Maternity services, in particular, have been demonstrated inconsistent standards across the UK. The EMMBRACE Report, published in 2020, found women from ethnic minorities were **x4 more likely to die** in childbirth, whilst the long-awaited Ockenden Report, published in 2022, recommended the transformation of maternity services across the UK, with a specific focus on training. Whilst estimated to cost **£200-250million**, there is strong political will to implement these changes with NHS England publishing a new 'Core Competency Framework' for all maternity services in June 2023, mandating additional training that needs to be made available to healthcare workers. NHS Trusts across the country are now trying to find ways to deliver more frequent, high-quality, 'on-the-job' skills training. Given the scale of the need, traditional approaches won't work; 'face-to-face simulation' is too time-consuming, expensive and reliant on expert faculty, whilst 'online e-learning' is too didactic and ill-suited to practical skills development. To deliver maternity services fit for the future, we need more efficient, practical, cost-effective ways to train the healthcare workforce at scale. **Our Solution:** **'Upskill.Health'** is a newly-incorporated, education technology start-up led by NHS clinicians. Supported by NHS England's 'Clinical Entrepreneurship Programme', we're on a mission to make simulation training accessible to healthcare workers everywhere (both in the NHS as well as in low and middle-income countries around the world). Through our partnership with Coventry & Warwickshire's Local Maternity & Newborn System (LMNS) and funding from Innovate UK, this project will deliver emergency maternity skills training through virtual reality (VR) across multiple NHS trusts in the region. For the first time, midwives will be able to engage in on-demand, simulation training where they work, at a time that suits them. An innovative approach in the NHS, this project will demonstrate evidence of VR simulation's efficacy and cost-effectiveness as a training tool, and once successful, will support our ambition to scale these solutions to more services.