Following on from their recent win at this year’s CIPD Northern Ireland Awards, HealthSectorTalent® (HST) 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.

HST 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