Our staff, policies and actions

People Strategy

The Trust’s strategic priority for people is “to be an outstanding employer”.

The Trust has a five-year People Strategy and an annual workplan which describes the priorities that will be focused on in the forthcoming 12 months. The approval and assurance on progress takes place through the People Committee.

The strategy tracks the employee life cycle of:

• Finding and recruiting staff - more people, through attraction, grow your own and retention.
• Valuing staff - compassionate and inclusive leadership, leading to a sense of belonging.
• Developing staff and new roles - equipping staff for current and future workforce requirements
• Retaining staff - flexible and predictable working, recruitment and retention initiatives, understanding why people leave.

Support for employees with a disability

The Trust believe that people and the organisation work best when equality and diversity are truly valued and promoted within the Trust’s culture and leadership. We aim to develop and ensure equality is mainstreamed into everything we do.

We have in place a robust recruitment policy to eliminate discrimination and promote equality of opportunity, which is underpinned by the Trust’s mission, vision and values and the Equality Act 2010.

Values based recruitment ensures that the future and current workforce is selected against the Trust’s values and behaviour framework, as well as the NHS Constitution.

Training is provided to managers who are responsible for recruitment, to ensure they are aware of their responsibilities at each stage of the recruitment process, from attraction to selection.

In addition to this, The Trust is a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer, which means:

• Actively attracting and recruiting disabled people to help fill opportunities (including jobs, apprenticeships, internships, work experience, etc.).
• Providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process.
• Offering an interview to disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job.
• Being flexible when assessing people so disabled job applicants have the best opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the job.
• Proactively offering and making reasonable adjustments as required.
• Encouraging our suppliers and partner firms to be Disability Confident.
• Ensuring employees have sufficient disability equality awareness training.

These policies apply to people with a disability wanting to work for the Trust, as well as staff who become disabled during the course of their employment.

The Trust also actively promotes and supports the employment of people who use our services to better reflect the diversity of our patients/clients. As a matter of good practice, we have service user representation within our selection processes.