Following on from their recent win at this year’s CIPD Northern Ireland Awards, Healthdaq® (formerly known as HealthSectorTalent®) has picked up another industry accolade at The Recruitment Marketing Awards in London for “Skills Shortage Resourcing”.

Established in 1980, The Recruitment Marketing Awards are the UK’s leading industry awards for recruitment marketing and talent management, and regularly attract the UK’s leading employer brands including Amazon, Next, Balfour Beatty and even MI6 (The British Secret Intelligence Service).

This year’s Skill Shortage Resourcing category sought entries from employers and their respective agencies that clearly demonstrated the ability to recruit effectively in an area that is notoriously difficult, requiring effort and some unconventional thinking to overcome its obstacles.

Healthdaq represented Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care (NHS) at this year’s ceremony taking home the Best Skill Shortage Resourcing Campaign for the multi-award winning “HSC Workforce Appeal”, an initiative of the Department of Health Northern Ireland to boost workforce capacity during Covid.

In this category, Judges looked for entries that found a “needle in a haystack” and “the winning entry needed that moment of brilliance, that eureka moment, an initiative that defied the odds.”

“As of 30 June, this year, we carried more than 5,000 vacancies across the health and social care system. The largest numbers were vacancies in relation to nurses and midwives, with a total of 1,786 across the system. In addition to those vacancies, the system is experiencing a higher than normal rate of absence due to COVID-19. The latest available figures show that almost 1,900 staff are absent across the health and social care sector, ill with COVID-19 or self-isolating. That adds 2·6% to the absence rate across the system. I have taken action to try to address that issue through the HSC Workforce Appeal. The response, to date, has been positive, with more than 5,000 applications.”

Robin Swann, Northern Ireland’s Minister of Health

In partnership with the Department of Health Northern Ireland, Healthdaq® (formerly known as HealthSectorTalent®) launched the HSC Workforce Appeal in March 2020 to boost the health and social care workforce of Northern Ireland during Covid-19. Healthdaq’s efforts in designing, implementing and managing this regional workforce initiative were recently recognised at the CIPD Northern Ireland HR Awards 2021.

The awards are highly regarded and deemed the most prestigious for the HR profession in Northern Ireland. They highlight organisations and individuals who have delivered impactful initiatives and have gone above and beyond during these unprecedented times. The entries are judged by a panel of leading HR and business professionals from a range of organisations from across the UK ensuring that only the very best are shortlisted.

This year’s “External Consultancy” category recognised the partnership between an individual consultant or consultancy and a client organisation working on a specific people-related project to address a strategic issue.

In winning this year’s award for Best External Consultancy, the panel of judges stated of Healthdaq’s entry:

“This was of particular interest to the judges as it involved an ongoing project which will have touched much of the population in Northern Ireland in some way or another; grappling difficult issues which have been under enormous public scrutiny and pressure in these extraordinary times and continue to impact our society across Northern Ireland. Managing complex, multiple stakeholder relationships has been fundamental to delivering desired outcomes and objectives, and at times clearly balancing conflicting and competing priorities.”

Healthdaq® (formerly known as HealthSectorTalent®) was today named Resourcing Supplier of the Year in the UK at this year’s Personnel Today Awards for its work in managing one of the largest recruitment campaigns in the history of the NHS during the initial outbreak of Covid-19.

Led by the Department of Health Northern Ireland, an emergency temporary staffing recruitment campaign was created and launched with the urgent objective of ensuring additional capacity was available in the event of the health and social care system being overwhelmed.

The HSC Workforce Appeal was designed, built and managed by Healthdaq on behalf of the Department of Health, the five Health and Social Care (NHS) Trusts and Northern Ireland’s Ambulance Service.

The strategy included rapidly creating a recruitment brand for the health and social care system in Northern Ireland; assembling a recruitment project team representing each of the key stakeholders and forming a central recruitment command and control centre to act as a single point of contact for all stakeholders and suppliers.

Pathways and workarounds were required to overcome strict protocols around the recruitment of clinical professionals including the application and interview process, employment checks and onboarding in a world of social distancing and remote working.

Over the course of 35 days, the Covid-19 Recruitment Project Team of 162 people working across 9 organisations (mostly working remotely due to social distancing and travel restrictions) delivered the largest recruitment campaign of its kind in Northern Ireland.

Personnel Today Award Judges Stated;

“Healthdaq impressed our judges with its emergency response to the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic in Northern Ireland. It rapidly built up a contingent workforce of clinical and non-clinical healthcare workers, attracting, selecting and deploying workers into the health and social care system. Our judges described its work as “amazing” in a unique and challenging situation.”