Thank You - Resourcing Team

We would like to introduce you to our Resourcing Team - comprising General Recruitment, Medical Staffing, Work Experience, Voluntary Services and Retire and Return.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise how much their workload must have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Resourcing Team, led by Laura Bick, is always focused on expanding our workforce, but the pandemic has meant prioritising COVID-19 related roles and candidates.

Tara O'Brien and General Recruitment have diligently worked to bring as many candidates through the pipeline as fast as possible, using amended NHS Employers pre-employment check processes. They have also processed over 100 student nurses, responding rapidly to the challenge of bringing essential front line workers into the Trust to support our response.

Michele Wilkinson and Medical Staffing have been key players in medical redeployment during this period, helping to arrange the redeployment of over 250 medical staff.

They had to track the many applicants from the national programme who wanted to work in Oxfordshire, manage doctors redeployed from different specialties and design bespoke rotas for redeployed junior doctors, all the time helping our clinical staff with their contractual queries.

They also processed the 155 medical students whom we brought in to support front line staff, and recruited an additional 70 Foundation doctors above and beyond their normal recruitment.

Alongside these major achievements have been other successes, such as moving recruitment panels and interviews on to virtual platforms such as Microsoft Teams, and adjusting induction sessions to enable social distancing.

Key to our COVID-19 response has also been the work of our dedicated volunteers at all four of our hospital sites, delivering food parcels and other essentials to front line staff.

Following a fantastic response to our call for help, our Voluntary Services team, with other colleagues in Resourcing, carried out over 90 pre-employment checks, working beyond normal hours to organise cover seven days a week.

Jenny Stone has been working hard to match volunteers to COVID-19-related roles, and to enable those dedicated Trust employees, who have taken the decision to delay their retirement, to stay and support their teams.

Terry Roberts, OUH Chief People Officer, says:

"We have been incredibly lucky to have such capable and committed people working in the vital area of recruitment during the past few challenging weeks.

"They have readily adapted to new ways of working and have brought additional staff in quickly to support clinical services.  Without their skills and dedication we simply could not deliver the patient care that we do."

Our workforce is our pride and joy, and these are the people who bring us all together.

Thank you all for what you do!

Pictured: General Recruitment Team