Recruitment

Ensuring we have the right people with the right skills to provide excellent patient care and support to patient care is at the heart of what we do.

Through our selection processes, we want to have the best people with compassionate hearts to care for our patients and build strong teams. We undertake patient and person-centred recruitment to assess our workforce of the future by utilising scenario based questions.

The year has been our most successful year for recruitment and we have achieved our planned workforce numbers a year ahead of plan. As a consequence our spend on bank and agency numbers are slowly falling in most areas, with the exception of our medical workforce where we remain challenged.

We continue to promote ourselves as an excellent employer who offers flexibility, training opportunities and an employer who ranks as one of the best mental health organisations nationally, as defined by the National Staff Survey 2023.

The Trust commenced the use of the recruitment system TRAC during the year and have thoroughly seen the benefits of this change. Our time to hire has significantly improved and each step of the recruitment process, including time to shortlist, time to interview, time to complete pre-employment checks has improved to such a level that we’ve been top three performing trusts nationally on a number of occasions.

A new attraction and marketing role introduced in April 2023 has allowed us to have much more of a presence at a number of events, generating interest in us as an employer, but also promoting us as a provider of mental health, learning disability and autism care in Lincolnshire.

Alongside our social media presence which is generating significant interest in the Trust and visits to our Trust website recruitment areas.

This proactive approach has taken our vacancy rate down from 18.71 in April 23 to 11.31 in March 2024 and we have been able to expand our workforce by over 300 extra whole time equivalent staff this year.

We have been highlighting the benefits of working for our organisation as an important attraction tool, promoting our investment in apprenticeships, the generous pension scheme, flexible working patterns and excellent national staff survey results have started the feeling of belonging right from the earliest opportunity.

The theme of belonging has continued into the prearrival information and the corporate programme and we now reach out to new colleagues on a number of occasions during the first 100 days, offering support, advice and signposting. Such an individual approach has been warmly welcomed and appreciated by our new starters.

We have also been designing and introducing new roles into our workforce that help encourage entry into foundation level roles with educational and pastoral support. The Psychology Intervention Facilitator (PIF) will help develop our workforce onto our Talking Therapies pipeline in the future.

The introduction of the Medical Support Worker and Physician Associate roles help and support our medical colleagues in their duties and offer a credible career pipeline within their field.

We have also continued to offer apprenticeship programmes and had over 100 people successfully registered on various apprenticeship programmes in 2023/24 supporting to grow our registered workforce of the future.