Having a diverse workforce and supporting our staff to be their best at work and flourish is a key priority. Investing in diversity of thought and lived experience benefits both patients and staff, supports retention and helps us to address the workforce challenges that our NHS faces.
Over the past two years we have run an award-winning, fully integrated, multi-partner recruitment programme focused on attracting local people from diverse backgrounds and with lived experience into roles in our West Yorkshire Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism trusts.
We ran the project in partnership with local voluntary sector organisation, Touchstone. Touchstone provides health and wellbeing services to diverse communities across Yorkshire and has specialist experience in inclusive recruitment practices. This partnership was key to the project’s success and enabled us to reach communities and diverse groups in a way that large NHS Trusts often struggle to do. We trialled a variety of engagement techniques from 1-1 employment support sessions, virtual events, large scale in person events and smaller hyper local approaches in local community spaces and marketplaces and also ran a series of Employability Workshops. We used a full range of marketing strategies including traditional methods such as leaflet drops, alongside digital campaigns, using TikTok and hosting live Instagram sessions with local influencers.
An evaluation of the work can be found here. The data shows that the project did reach diverse groups and high numbers, but that we didn’t recruit the numbers we would have liked. In summary, the project supported 168 people with one-to-one sessions, provided information to approximately 2000 people through in person engagement events, 1300 through virtual events and supported 103 applications and resulted in 45 job offers.
The evaluation provides details of some of the reasons we struggled to recruit higher numbers and explores the barriers to employment. We’ve developed a series of case studies following the journey of the people we supported throughout this project, to learn from their experiences. We want to use this learning to help us drive forward change and challenge some of the traditional recruitment processes that deter people from applying for posts in the NHS.
A particular area of learning that came through from this project and through feedback at different forums across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, was from our neurodivergent applicants and colleagues. They talked about the challenges they face in applying for roles, feeling comfortable to ask for and accessing reasonable adjustments at the application stage and then once in post being able to thrive and stay well at work. Our candidates we supported also witnessed in some areas, a lack of understanding and awareness about what adjustments can be put in place and how to do this.
To support with this we have developed a series of videos that show how important adjustments are to neurodivergent people in the workplace and how managers can support them. These videos show people across our organisations sharing their experiences and the adjustments that have supported them.
The final part of the project is focusing on developing a Recruitment and Retention Toolkit, including information about reasonable adjustments, for the WY Mental Health Trusts. This should be available in few months.
If anyone would like to find out more about this project, please contact sonya.robertshaw@nhs.net
