Time to shine Hundreds of nurses welcomed to our hospital over the last six months in successful recruitment drive Following a dedicated campaign focused on recruiting a host of amazing nurses to join our hospital, we are now on target to have less than a 10% nursing vacancy rate overall by the end of this financial year.
nurses joined our hospital.
The programme begun last summer – when the vacancy rate for staff nurses (band five) was 41%. This had been a longstanding challenge at PAHT. A high vacancy rate impacts on both our patients and our people, as nurses on our wards will have less time to spend with each patient.
Since last summer, we have been welcoming between 20 to 30 new nurses per month.
To improve the experience for our patients and our people, Sharon McNally, director of nursing, midwifery, and allied health professionals, and Sarah Webb, deputy director of nursing, devised a strategy to rapidly increase the recruitment of amazing staff nurses to join our teams across the hospital. A key focus of this work was to recruit significantly more overseas nurses, beginning with a recruitment drive in India in July 2019. Sarah, and colleagues from theatres, ITU, Fleming and Ray Wards visited Cochin in India to interview nurses who were keen to work in the UK. Over four days they interviewed more than 200 nurses and made 132 offers. Just three months later, the first four
Previously, around six or seven nurses joined our hospital per month, which did not fill the posts of those who were retiring or moving on to new opportunities.
A range of measures have supported this:
Introducing a requirement that all overseas nurses who are offered a position at our hospital have already obtained their English language qualifications and are in the process of getting approval from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) to convert to UK registration. This has significantly reduced the time from making an offer of employment to our new nurses beginning in their posts. This is with the aim that all nurses begin with us in six months of receiving their offer. Ideally, and frequently, this time period is three months. Redesigning the process for candidates of the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), which is part of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) registration
process for nurses and midwives trained outside of the European Union, so that it is more streamlined and enables overseas nurses to concentrate on passing their OSCE before joining their ward teams Ensuring that clinical support is available on wards from four new clinical practice educators so that our new nurses are given the help they need to become established in their roles, which in turns aids retention of our people Offering a package of support, led by Maria Mantziou, our recruitment and retention nurse lead, to help them settle into living and working in Harlow As of this month (February 2020), we now have a 12.7% vacancy rate for staff nurses and we are on track to achieve our less than 10% vacancy rate target for staff nurses – and 10% overall – by the end of March 2020. With increased numbers of substantive posts filled, we are working with our wards and departments to help embed the new nurses into their new roles. The reduced vacancy rate has the added positive impact of decreasing our turnover rate, as colleagues are more likely to enjoy their working environment 10
