Evaluation of Recruitment and Inclusion Project with West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership

Since 2022, Touchstone have been working with the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership (WYHCP) to lead a Recruitment and Inclusion Project. This project aims to improve the inclusivity of recruitment and retention processes in three West Yorkshire NHS Mental Health Trusts. As the project comes to an end this year, the team, Emilie Akselsen (Project Coordinator at Touchstone) and Sonya Robertshaw (Workforce Lead for the WYHCP), have written this blog to reflect on the project’s outcomes.

Over the past two years, we have run an award-winning, multi-partner recruitment programme, focused on attracting local people from diverse backgrounds and with lived experience into roles in our West Yorkshire Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism trusts. To run this project, the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership worked in partnership with local voluntary sector organisation, Touchstone, to draw from their experience as a leading inclusive employer. This partnership was key to the project’s success and enabled the NHS Trusts to reach communities and diverse groups in a way that large NHS Trusts often struggle to do.

Having a diverse workforce and supporting staff to be their best at work and flourish is a key priority for the NHS and for Touchstone. Investing in diversity of thought and lived experience benefits patients, service users, and staff. It also supports retention and helps us to address the workforce challenges that the NHS face.

Reaching Diverse Communities Across West Yorkshire

To achieve positive changes in recruitment and retention in this project, we trialled a variety of engagement techniques from 1-1 employment support sessions, a series of Employability Workshops and smaller, hyper-local approaches like community marketplaces to virtual events and large-scale in-person job fairs and events across West Yorkshire. To reach people with our work, we used a full range of marketing strategies, including traditional methods like leaflet drops, alongside digital campaigns, using TikTok and hosting live Instagram sessions with local influencers.

Outcomes and Learning From the Project

The data shows that the project successfully reached diverse groups and high numbers, but that we didn’t recruit the numbers we would have liked. In summary, the project supported 168 people with one-to-one sessions, provided information to approximately 2000 people through in-person engagement events, 1300 through virtual events and supported 103 applications and resulted in 45 job offers. A fuller evaluation of the work can be found here.

The evaluation provides details of some of the reasons we struggled to recruit higher numbers and explores the barriers to employment. We’ve developed a series of case studies following the journey of the people we supported throughout this project, to learn from their experiences, which can be found in the evaluation report. We want to use this learning to help us drive forward change and challenge some of the traditional recruitment processes that deter people from applying for posts in the NHS.

Supporting Neurodivergent Colleagues

A particular area of learning that came through from this project and through feedback at different forums across the WYHCP was from our neurodivergent applicants and colleagues. They talked about the challenges they face in applying for roles, feeling comfortable to ask for and access reasonable adjustments at the application stage, and then once in post being able to thrive and stay well at work. The candidates we supported also witnessed, in some areas, a lack of understanding and awareness about what adjustments can be put in place and how to do this.

To support with this, Touchstone’s Sarbjit Kaur has led a project to develop a series of videos, showing how important adjustments are to neurodivergent people in the workplace and how managers can support them. These videos show people across our organisations sharing their experiences and the adjustments that have supported them. To watch these videos in full, please visit: Supporting neurodivergent people in the workplace – YouTube.

The final part of the project also focuses on developing a Neurodiversity Recruitment and Retention Toolkit, including information about reasonable adjustments, for the West Yorkshire Mental Health Trusts. This is to support current staff, managers, and new applicants alike. This should be available in a few months.