Bury launches central ‘workforce hub’ for health and care recruitment as part of COVID-19 response

People who want to join Bury’s response to Covid-19 by becoming a key health or care worker can now use a single website to apply for both short and longer-term roles.

The Bury Local Care Organisation (LCO), who represent all key providers of health and care services in Bury, has been helping to coordinate the urgent recruitment of staff and has worked with Reed Employment to create a new application process. 

To support this, the LCO have set up a remote central ‘workforce hub’ to help recruit staff, including temporary and agency workers, where other avenues such as internal redeployment within organisations have been exhausted. The development of the hub has had full support from Bury comissioners.

The hub will not only provide a system-wide skills database but will be able to identify where staff are most needed and will have the most immediate positive impact throughout the Bury footprint. The hub will have a system wide helicopter view and, with senior clinical input, will deploy workers to the point of greatest impact. The hub will also highlight available Employee Assistance Programmes where required.

All providers of health and care services will now have access to temporary staff via the workforce hub. Care homes who are experiencing a particularly challenging time in terms of staff shortages will be able to benefit from the availability of the temporary Reed workforce. Whilst Reed is predominantly providing support workers, it is anticipated that they will expand their offer to qualified professionals when providers have exhausted their own established channels.

The workforce hub officially launched on Monday 27th April 2020 and has already deployed temporary workers to public and private sector providers system wide.

There are numerous opportunities in a variety of health and care roles across Bury including Palliative Care Nurses and Adult Care Assistants, links below:

Kath Wynne-Jones, Chief Officer of the Bury Local Care Organisation, commented: “Every health and care organisation whether in the public, private or voluntary sector, has been working together to maintain services and support the workforce which is experiencing huge challenges during this period.

“GP practices have been offering nursing and support workers to the community and acute sectors, volunteers have been undertaking crucial tasks to protect the most vulnerable, current workforce changing working patterns to provide 24 hour cover seven days per week and others have been changing roles to ensure that service needs are met.

“These actions have demonstrated the compassion and dedication of the Bury community, and this workforce hub will offer additional support right across the board by helping to secure more resource wherever it is needed.”

ENDS

Issued: 7 May 2020.

Note to editors:

Bury LCO is a formal arrangement between seven publicly-funded organisations working in health (Northern Care Alliance NHS Group, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, BARDOC Ltd and Bury GP Federation) and social care (Bury Council, Persona Care and Support Ltd and Bury Voluntary, Community and Faith Alliance).