Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust Boosts Midwifery Team Following Successful Recruitment Events

The challenge 

Although Maternity services have seen significant improvements in recent years, they continue to come under pressure due to being under-resourced and under-staffed. Not only can this negatively impact employee morale but also significantly impacts on patient care as highlighted in the report by Donna Ockenden, Chair of the Independent Maternity Review.

The recent announcement of an additional £95 million set to be spent on improving Maternity safety in England, is greatly welcomed and much required to help reduce midwifery shortages, and more importantly improve the experience of care received. With focus for this expected to be on recruiting ‘as many as 1,000 midwives’ this presents a significant opportunity for Trusts to focus on using value-led attraction strategies to attract caring and compassionate midwives whose values align.

Our focused digital attraction campaigns are specifically designed to help Trusts to target known hard to fill areas, and our recent campaign for Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has been helping to do just that. Having identified a need to attract band 5 qualified midwives, the Just R. team has once again worked in partnership with the Trust to raise awareness of two recruitment events specifically focused on maternity.

The solution

With in-person interview days planned for February and April, the two one month digital campaigns focused on attracting final year midwifery students and qualified midwives to join the Trust.

 Strong key messages and showcasing unique selling points make all the difference when resonating with a passive audience.  With a wider NHS England focus on providing training and leadership programmes, the learning and development opportunities available at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust formed the basis of the messaging for the campaign.

 Detailed targeting was used to ensure the campaign reached both passive candidates and with a relocation package available, targeting focused both on the local area and further afield to maximise the pool of quality potential applicants. Using insight gained during the discovery meeting with the Trust, we created a bespoke landing page designed to capture the optimum information from an individual prior to submitting a full application.

To be eligible for shortlisting for the interview days, suitable candidates needed to pre-apply via NHS jobs. Using the Just R. Recruitment Pipeline Management system to manage enquiries, which the Trust also had access to, our candidate consultant team pre-screened all enquiries and actively directed suitable candidates to submit application forms.

Working collaboratively with the Trust to establish effective communication allowed every enquiry to be maximised. Feedback on applications received was received regularly from the Trust and the Just R. team carried out follow up calls to further encourage outstanding applicants to apply.  By putting people in the people process this not only resulted in a great number of applications for the Trust but also allowed for any questions from potential candidates to be answered, opening up communication and helping creating excitement and passion amongst potential future employees about joining the Trust.