The presentation covered what we do, looked back at how we have grown over the last few years and briefly looked ahead to what’s next for the team. We thought it may be interesting to summarise here what we covered for anyone who is interested in finding out a little bit more about us.
About Us
Primary Care Careers are part of the NHS. We are a recruitment support service funded at ICB level to support attraction, recruitment and retention across the primary care workforce.
- Attraction is all about getting the right people interested in working with you.
- Recruitment is the process of hiring candidates for a specific position or job.
- Retention is the extent to which an employer keeps their people working within their organisation.
Our aim is to make general practice a career destination and provide a one-stop recruitment solution for primary care. We work directly with practices and primary care networks (PCNs) with the purpose of finding the right people with the right skills, at the right time, for the right roles.
At the moment, we work across 5 ICBs in the east of England but we are a virtual team so there are no geographical boundaries regarding which ICBs we can support looking ahead. As we are funded at ICB level, there’s no charge to the practices and PCNs for using our service so we are keen to use every opportunity we can to make sure everyone knows about us. We are currently working with 72% of GP practices and 80% of PCNs and we are really pleased with these figures but very much want to ensure we are working with all practices and PCNs that are recruiting in the areas we cover. We would be very happy to come along to staff briefings within the other ICBs we support to deliver a similar presentation.
Since April last year, across the east of England, we have advertised almost 2,500 jobs and received over 27,000 applications. We have worked with 400 GP practices and 98 PCNs. In addition to this, we have also worked with a number of charities and other organisations who employ staff in the primary care space.
Our service is a full recruitment support package so that can include help with writing adverts, placing them on our website, support with shortlisting, preparing for interviews, discussing recruitment challenges and hard to fill roles etc.
Our Journey to Date and What’s Next
Our growth journey has been quite remarkable. It hasn’t been without its challenges and frustrations but has shown what a small but mighty and very determined and hardworking team can achieve.
Less than 4 years ago in June 2020 we advertised just 6 roles, this grew to 50 within 6 months (February 2021) and in September last year we advertised 246 roles – an increase of more than 3,300% which is quite significant for a small virtual team of 6!
If we look back to what’s changed during the last few years, aside from the significant increase in volume, it’s probably the range of roles that we now support with. There is a huge variety of roles on our website – care navigators, pharmacists, GPs, paramedics, social prescribers and many others too. We currently have more than 200 adverts live on our website.
The other thing that has changed over the last few years has been what’s included as ‘primary care’. We are now considering how we can support pharmacy, optometry and dentistry (POD) and trying to put everything we have learnt about general practice into developing a service that’s fit for the future of primary care. We have recently been running pilot projects across pharmacy and dentistry and it’s really positive that we have had some initial success with roles being filled. We understand that POD operates differently within the different ICBs so we are keen to talk to anyone who has an interest in these areas and how we may be able to roll out our service.
We are an ambitious team who are keen to continuously improve. We are working hard to develop a value-added service that’s fit for the future of primary care. We are keen to work collaboratively across systems and provide a great service to everyone we work with. We would love to hear from anyone who would like to find out more about what we do and can be contacted at enquiries@eoeprimarycarecareers.nhs.uk or 01206 918760.
