A few months ago, the podcast passed 1 million downloads, and it feels fantastic to get to this next milestone of 300 episodes. A big thank you to everyone for all the support you give me, whether that’s through listening, sponsoring or appearing on the show. This podcast would not exist without you, and I’m incredibly grateful.
Unlike the 100th episode where I published a whitepaper or the 200th episode which I recorded live at RecFest, I’m no doing anything special to mark this triple century. Instead, I’m focusing on continuing to create valuable content as well as shaping my plans to take the show to 400 episodes and beyond. I’ll be sharing more details on those in the coming weeks.
With the pandemic shaping the content of the last 52 episodes, it seems very appropriate in this episode to talk to Nicola McQueen, the CEO of NHS Professionals. NHS Professionals is owned by The Department of Health in the UK and is responsible for providing the NHS with a flexible workforce of Doctors and Nurses. This really is the frontline of recruiting during the pandemic, and I’m grateful to Nicola for sharing the story as well as some lessons learnt around rapid change and agile workforce deployment that all employers can learn from.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The role of NHS Professionals
• Stand Up, Step Forward & Save Lives
• The unprecedented challenges of recruiting during a pandemic
• Reducing onboarding from 4 weeks to 24 hours
• Change and motivation
• Long term talent pipeline engagement
• The importance of being bold
• Agile workforce deployment
• What comes next
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Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:56]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 300 of of the Recruiting Future podcast. A few months ago, the podcast passed 1 million downloads and it feels fantastic to get to this next milestone of 300 episodes. A big thank you to everyone for all the support you give me. Whether that’s through listening, sponsoring or appearing on the show, this podcast would not exist without you and I’m incredibly grateful. Unlike the hundredth episode where I published a white paper, or the 200th episode which I recorded live at Wreckfest, I’m not doing anything special to mark this triple century. Instead, I’m focused on continuing to create valuable content, as well as shaping my plans to take the show to 400 episodes and beyond. I’ll be sharing more details on those plans in the coming weeks. With the pandemic shaping the content of the last 52 episodes of the show, it seems very appropriate in this episode to talk to Nicola McQueen, the CEO of NHS Professionals. NHS Professionals is owned by the Department of Health in the UK and is responsible for providing the NHS with a flexible workforce of doctors and nurses. This really is the front line of recruiting during the pandemic and I’m grateful to Nicola for sharing the story, as well as some lessons learned around rapid change and agile workforce deployment that all employers can learn from.
Matt Alder [00:02:36]:
Hi, Nicola, and welcome to the podcast.
Nicola McQueen [00:02:38]:
Hello, Matt. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:45]:
Everyone what you do?
Nicola McQueen [00:02:46]:
I can indeed. So, Nicola McQueen. I’m currently the Chief Executive of NHS Professionals, but spent the last 20 years in workforce and recruitment. So delighted to be talking to you about what we’ve been doing across the nhs. Matt, in the last few months, that’s been quite unprecedented. But NHS Professionals is a workforce solutions provider. It’s in the nhs, it’s owned by the Department of Health and Social Care and by the largest part of our business, we will effectively manage the bank supply Hospitals. So in simple terms, that’s really managing all of the unfilled shifts within a roster and we do that through managing a really big 130,000 plus flexible worker pool. And that’s across the whole of England. We also do a whole host of things around international recruitment gateway paths. So those that are perhaps training to come into the nhs, we’ve got a doctor’s business that just does doctors recruitment, we do permanent recruitment. So all the things that your listeners would typically recognise from a big staff In business.
Matt Alder [00:03:56]:
Fantastic stuff. And we’ll dive much more into that in a second.
Matt Alder [00:04:01]:
Before we do though, tell us how.
Matt Alder [00:04:02]:
You got to do what you do now.
Nicola McQueen [00:04:05]:
So very interestingly, because I spent 17 years in capita running a whole variety of their staffing and HR businesses, just a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to take some of the specialist staff in businesses out of capita into their own private entity. And one of those businesses was the healthcare business. And that was my first insight to healthcare recruitment. So when the NHS said, would you consider coming and working with us? It was actually a really interesting challenge because I think for me, particularly being in workforce for 20 years, there’s no bigger challenge than having the right amount of doctors and nurses in the nhs. What I didn’t know back then was that six months into my tenure as Chief Exec, that we would be facing a global pandemic, which has put the bar much higher on my challenge, but that was how I came to work for the nhs.
Matt Alder [00:05:07]:
So I think you’ve been in your post for a year this week, and the pandemic really started halfway through that. Talk us through a little bit more in terms of how the pandemic has impacted your NHS trust clients, your bank members, your team and you personally.
Nicola McQueen [00:05:24]:
Like for any business, this was an overnight shift of focus for us. Ours probably just started ahead of everybody else’s. So we started our planning in January. But I’ll never forget sort of the big turning point for us, where we knew this was real and this was going to be big. And that was early in March when we was at the Chief Nurse Summit. And this is Ruth May, the Chief Nurse of England, holds a summit every year to talk about what’s new in health care and what’s coming over Horizon. Well, of course, at that point the entire agenda was Covid related and it was sort of those two days that really spelt out the fact that this was going to be a dramatic change for the business. So we very much at that point paused all activity. That was business as usual, and our big priority was as many cleared professionals ready and able to support at the front line as possible. That was our one challenge. So everything changed, Matt, whether that be for our trusts who were desperately trying to think about how they have, you know, allow capacity in their ICUs, how they make sure that they close down some of their normal day to day services to allow for the COVID patients to arrive. So everything changed for them. So we had to support all the trusts mobilising that changing effort. We also had to think about how we could register and clear more people to work on the front line. So typically in our environment, an onboarding process for a professional, a nurse or a doctor, will take about three to four weeks. We had to make sure that we could turn that process around in 24 hours. And that was really significant change because we were having to look at the entire process end to end and decide what could and couldn’t survive. So everything changed for our teams. We had 850 staff that work in NHS professionals and we pretty much turned the entire business into a clearinghouse for those early weeks. So for all of our doctors and nurses, they were obviously having to think about what that meant to them. So, you know, how to access the relevant PPE and the training required and how to access their hospitals through different routes and so on. So everything changed.
Matt Alder [00:08:00]:
It must have been the craziest time. Tell us a little bit more about how the recruitment services changed, how the process changed. Was there particular technology that you were using? How were you able to sort of change things that quickly? And what had to happen?
Nicola McQueen [00:08:15]:
Yeah, so in terms of technology, we had to effectively allow people to self serve as much as possible. So we did that through our existing technology, actually, but then we added new technology into our vetting process. So one of those things was video technology to do ID checking and do some of the clinical interviews in a very short space of time. So it was about making sure that we could re engineer some of our workflows in our current recruitment database and our onboarding systems, but then insert new pieces of technology to enable us to get through the processes much quicker. And of course, for us, a few weeks into these changing processes, that’s when the national lockdown set in. So we had designed a process that was well supported through our service centers, only to two weeks later or three weeks later, have to turn that into a complete remote solution. So we had all 850 of our staff, of which about 400 of them are based in a head office, all into remote locations. So that Meant quite a bit of system and access change as well.
Matt Alder [00:09:32]:
It obviously sounds like it was an incredibly intense time. Lots of changes, adapting to things as they were going on and really being at the front line from a recruitment perspective in this international emergency, how did you manage to motivate your team through that period of intense, very rapid change?
Nicola McQueen [00:09:53]:
Motivation of the team just was the last thing we had to worry about, actually. And in all other transformational programs or change programs, that’s probably right top of the list. But this was so crystal clear on what our challenge was and we had our why, you know, we all, you know, the whole country was turning to how can we support, you know, the nhs? So we didn’t have an issue in staff motivation one bit. In fact, the team rallied and, you know, efforts and discretional effort went absolutely through the roof. And I think that’s down to this single mission of support the nhs. Let’s not, you know, be overwhelmed. We, our teams were also supporting all of the recruitment that was going on in the new Nightingales, the Nightingale Hospitals, as the field hospitals arose. So, again, hugely motivating for the team to feel like they’re doing something that was making a difference. We also run a huge recruitment advertising campaign. We run a campaign called Stand Up, Step Forward and Save Lives. And it was a really powerful video that went across all of the traditional television channels and the radio stations and that drew in 60,000 new professionals that wanted to work and support the front line. So the team didn’t have a minute to think about not being busy. It was just an incredible effort with an incredible amount of work to be done in just a few weeks. What was really interesting, though, is that after this initial surge of activity, lots of applications, lots of mobilization of workforce to front lines, demand actually redacted considerably. So if you think about hospitals running all of their services in full to literally within a few weeks, switching all of, you know, the majority of their services that weren’t AE related or Covid or ICU related down. Demand for nurses and professionals actually went backwards. So we found ourselves in a situation where our call centre was taking on average about 1200 calls a day, pre pandemic to about 12,000 a day. The majority of those calls were those trying to get access to work. So health care professionals calling in to say, where can we go? Where can we support? And our team going, we don’t need you right now. So that was a really interesting. That was the bit where we had to step in and motivate the staff because we’d done A huge amount of activity to bring as many people forward to step up, save lives, to then not actually have the opportunity to utilise them all. So that was a bit of a step change in how we wanted to motivate our teams and all the professionals.
Matt Alder [00:12:52]:
Who knows exactly what’s going to happen. But we seem to be moving into another phase as we’re recording this. Infections seem to be on the, on the rise again. So obviously there’s a huge challenge that’s still, still remaining. And as you said, you’ve, you’ve got thousands of new candidates that you’re dealing with. What are you doing to sort of keep those people engaged in the, in the longer term?
Nicola McQueen [00:13:14]:
Really, really great point. So one of the biggest things that we needed to make sure that we, we did was have the best access to work for these professionals. So as we start to switch services back on across the nhs, of course we’re deploying all of these fantastic healthcare workers into frontline roles and support roles. We’re also supporting the Test and Trace program that saw us recruit 10,000 people within just three weeks to that program. And they play the role of clinical tracing. So they’re the people that would contact somebody that had received a positive COVID test and help them trace out where they’d been over the few days that they may have been infected but not known about it, and help to identify those contacts that we might need to ask to ISO. So we’ve got a huge amount of our clinicians that have stepped up and stepped forward, particularly those that have returned to the nhs, they might have previously retired and they’ve come back to support. We’ve got a lot of those people deployed onto a program such as Test and Trace, and there’s loads of things coming downstream. So we’ve obviously got national vaccine program that we all need to be thinking about now, particularly around, you know, rolling out flu jabs and any COVID vaccine as that becomes available. There’s going to be lots and lots of catch up now. So Health Assessments is a good example. I think there’s in the region of, you know, 30, 40,000 health assessments that will need to be caught up in a rapid amount of time so we can utilise this workforce. So one of the big things for us and for the NHS is trying to change the narrative now. Instead of saying step up, step forward, save lives, we’re saying, stay, save lives. Let’s make this workforce fit for the future, let’s make it enduring and let’s utilise the workforce in Perhaps different ways that we perhaps wouldn’t have considered pre pandemic. So a good example being that all of our test and trace clinicians are all home based and on audio. So what else can we do, particularly in catch up with health assessments and so on, that we can turn into, you know, working from home video platform enabled consultations. So it’s endless. You know, we have got so much still to do, but we’ve got, you know, a very willing and ready workforce that we will continue to motivate through, you know, the best access to work.
Matt Alder [00:15:40]:
Essentially there are lots of employers who are having to make changes to their recruitment processes and the way their recruitment teams, their recruitment teams work and that that’s going to be an ongoing process for a number of months, if not, if not years.
Matt Alder [00:15:55]:
What advice would you share share with.
Matt Alder [00:15:58]:
Organizations going through those types of changes from the lessons that you’ve learned in the last few months?
Nicola McQueen [00:16:03]:
That’s a great question, but I think for me, be bold because we’ve seen change that, you know, it’s a crisis like this that’s allowed us to implement huge change quickly. So be bold and make big changes. And I’ll give you an example of that, that we’ve always run a high touch call center to deal with all of our clinicians, but actually when we got incredibly busy and, you know, the call volumes went up dramatically, we implemented web chat and lots of people said, oh, we thought about that before and you know, this workforce just won’t respond well to web chat. But we was bold and we said, no, we’re going to implement it and we’re going to force a lot of our traffic through web channel chat. And they took to it like a duck to water. Like, you know, lots of us perhaps would have thought, but some in the healthcare sector didn’t and we were bold to do that and it paid dividends. So for us at nhsp, and you know, how we take this into our new future is we’re going to continue to be bold and we’re going to continue to sort of push the boundaries on technology innovation because if we’re in a secondary peak in a couple of months time, we want to be ready for it, but even if we’re not, we can increase our capacity to what we can do in the future. So be bold. You know, people are incredibly tolerant of organisations going through change and we certainly felt that through the pandemic.
Matt Alder [00:17:35]:
So final question, what’s next? What do the next 12 months hold for NHS professionals?
Nicola McQueen [00:17:41]:
I mean, it’s really difficult to predict the next few months, let alone the next 12 months. But for us, what we do absolutely know is that we’ve got to continue to be agile and responsive to the NHS needs as they change. Now, we’ve all started doing lots of work around, you know, reasonable worst case scenarios for secondary peaks. So we’ve thought very long and hard about, you know, what we would do this time round in deployment of staff mobilising for field hospitals. So lots and lots of thinking gone into what we might want to do in the event of a secondary peak. That said, so much of that can be taken into our future for agile workforce deployment. I think what’s different in our strategy this side of COVID versus previous is that we’re going to be looking at how can we support the wider integrated care systems, so not just an NHS hospital as such, let’s think much bigger and wider about how we deploy our health care professionals across the care setting. We’re going to need far more people into social care and into primary care settings, so we’re going to think about how we can enact that mobilization and that’s going to be different for us. We’re also going to be switching back on all of the international recruitment channels. As you would expect, international travel was broadly shut down during that initial Covid period. So we’re going to be investing lots of time, energy and efforts into building that pipeline back up and utilising these brand new nurses coming into the NHS to increase the capacity. We’ve got lots and lots of ideas about how we can convert from education into nursing. So lots of pathways and gateway programs that we’re going to be launching and that’s going to be all over the next 12 months. And we are going to continue to invest in our technology. So all of the things that we’ve found comfort in plugging in to utilise in time of need, we will think about making sure that that becomes part of our enduring technology proposition. So lots of work on that roadmap and that transformation program itself will dominate quite a bit of our time over the coming months.
Matt Alder [00:20:04]:
Nicola, thank you very much for joining me.
Nicola McQueen [00:20:06]:
It was lovely talking to you, Matt, and just having the opportunity to sort of reflect on all that’s been going on over the last few months. So thank you.
Matt Alder [00:20:14]:
My thanks to Nicola McQueen. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for recruiting future. You can search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com. on that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
