Cycle Training for Staff

Proposal:  NHS Greenwich & Greenwich Community Health Services currently have a draft Active Travel Plan and aim to expand the promotion of Active Travel through a shared post on Active Travel between the NHS & Local authority.  With this in mind the organisation would like to request funding to deliver Cycle training for its staff and the staff of four external partner organisations in the borough.  The training provider that we’d like to use to deliver the work is Cycle Training (www.cycletraining.co.uk)   Based on the National Standards for Cycle Training, also known as Bikeability, the Trust aim to provide individual training which takes place mainly on roads and focuses on helping current and new cyclists cope with real junctions and traffic.  This training is referred to as “realistic training” or “assertive cycling”.   We’d like to also offer the same training in a group format to 4 different organisations.  Lastly we’d like to deliver cycle maintenance courses eg puncture repairs or braking systems across the same organisations.

Update May 2011:

Initially we planned to provide a mixture of training on roads & for new cyclists but then decided to run two different sets of Cycle Maintenance training in order to reach more people.  We wanted both sets of training to meet the needs of our current cyclists internally as well as cyclists from other organisations.

Update August 2011:  

The first round of cycle training took part in July ( we recruited 9 & 7 attended); & we plan to run a further session later on in the year.   I had excellent feedback anecdotally from staff here about the course, and when I receive the Evaluation forms from Cycle Training Uk, I can provide you with more feedback.

The fact that we only recruited a small number for the first training can be used to our advantage as those who attended internally are promoting it to other colleagues so we hope to recruit greater numbers next time.  The training supplemented fitted in with the fact that we run Cyclescheme within the Trust.  A group of staff also did the London to Brighton BHF ride this year & this was a useful event upon which we could advertise the training.