Carly Wilson, Education Lead at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and WYAAT Enabling Staff Movement Programme Manager, reveals how a West Yorkshire and Harrogate workforce initiative is making it easier for NHS colleagues to move between organisations.

The challenge

A large proportion of the NHS workforce move from one NHS organisation to another during their career, and many work in more than one organisation at the same time. The Enabling Staff Movement Programme aims to improve staff experience by avoiding duplication and ensuring employment, deployment and induction practices are tailored to the needs of the staff within West Yorkshire and Harrogate.

The programme is broken down into workstreams to reduce duplication and improve processes for new starters within the areas of Occupational Health, Recruitment and Mandatory and Statutory Training (MaST).

The plan

Employed as the Programme Manager, my ultimate goal is to support an agile workforce who are able to move seamlessly between NHS providers. The main aims of the programme are to:

• Enable a more robust new starter process and reduce duplication of administration processes
• Ensure that valid training for staff moving between trusts is recognised by the new employer, reducing repetition of training
• Increase the use of digital platforms and the ability to share information effectively
• Increase the use of updating employment records online instead of using paper forms
• Ensure onboarding processes are efficient and professionally managed
• Implement relevant and value-adding inductions

Successes

The Enabling Staff Movement Programme supported an unprecedented recruitment drive during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The programme ensured that staff transferring within the NHS had a more streamlined recruitment experience, with much less repetition of repeating unnecessary training. It also meant that the administration processes behind the scenes flowed through the systems more efficiently.

The programme has been well received by the WYAAT trusts. The following testimonial recently came from a recruitment colleague in one of the trusts we work with.

“Working within the Streamlining group has enabled our trust to work more collaboratively within the region. It’s allowed us to provide assurance to our trust that the training we deliver meets set standards as defined in the Core Skills Training Framework, and allows better staff movements within trusts. More than half of our new starters come from other NHS organisations, many of which have a training record that doesn’t need to be repeated. Passporting of training has saved more than 8,000 hours of unnecessary training which offers a better onboarding experience for new starters.”

I’m incredibly passionate about the programme and what it can achieve. Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that all new staff have the best recruitment and onboarding experience possible. I hope that through the programme we are able to continue to share best practice, lessons learned and resources and start to work more cohesively, as one NHS.