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 specialise 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.
Read some case studies from people who were supported to be successful in their applications to our trusts.
An evaluation of the work can be found here.
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 to challenge some of the traditional recruitment processes that deter people from applying for posts in the NHS.
Through this work on inclusive recruitment and through feedback at different forums across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, we heard feedback from our neurodivergent colleagues about challenges they face in their daily work life. There was also a lack of awareness about reasonable adjustments that can be easily implemented to support colleagues.
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.
Click through from here to view the videos and find out more.
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
For more than two years, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership has been working with The Boost Project at Leeds Mind, a project developed to recruit and train volunteers from diverse and maginalised backgrounds. These volunteers co-facilitated peer support groups. All of Boost volunteers have lived experience of mental health struggles.
While on the project, volunteers worked with staff from Leeds Mind to produce a toolkit for creating an inclusive environment. Information for this toolkit was contributed by the volunteers through one-to-one interviews, a survey and group discussions and developed to help organisations integrate more inclusive practices in their work.
