Need to know
For #TeamEEAST Last updated: 20 April 2024 at 06:32
As we find ourselves facing increased demand and handover pressures moving into winter, colleagues will be acutely aware that we have remained heavily reliant on the use of PAS and agency staff to fill our current capacity gap whilst we recruit and develop more of our own staff.
A lot of work is being done to recruit permanent employees to ensure our staff see a difference in the their working lives, as well as reliable and cost-effective delivery of care to patients.
We are developing a new marketing campaign for a range of roles, including qualified, graduate and student paramedics alongside IAPs and AAPs.
However, it is still hard to recruit enough staff to meet our funded establishment so far this year and to develop the high quality and calibre of staff for our Trust, we have to explore broader opportunities in line with the national context of recruiting to the gap in the profession.
To open up potential options, we’ve started work on an international recruitment campaign to attract candidates from the rest of Europe and further afield such as Australia. International recruitment is a mainstay of the NHS and other trusts have had significant success in recruiting internationally. We have liaised with our counterparts in four other services - LAS, NWAS, SCAS and SWAS - to learn from their experiences. A pilot campaign is beginning in Warsaw, Poland, working with a specialist recruitment which has lots of experience in this area. A small and focussed team made up of some of our current Polish colleagues, clinical and driving assessors, and HR staff will visit Poland on today and tomorrow (25th and 26th November) to assess candidates selected by Hays.
We want to identify some excellent candidates who can join us here in EEAST in the coming months and be embedded as part of our team in the new financial year. Our experience in Poland will assist in identifying our appetite for international recruitment on the months and years to come.
Published 25th November, 2016