Recruitment & Selection
Employed and voluntary staff
St Andrew’s Hospice recognises that it is vital that its Recruitment & Selection Policy embodies the principles of the Equal Opportunity Policy and promotes the objective of ensuring fairness and consistency in the selection and promotion of employees within the organisation.
It also assists managers who have responsibility for making appointment decisions to ensure that equal opportunity is afforded to all applicants and appointments are made on merit.
The recruitment process will be undertaken in line with the following hospice policies and procedures:
- Recruitment and Selection Policy
- Volunteer Policy
- Equal Opportunities Policy
- Information Management & Data Protection Policy
- Dignity at Work Policy
View our current employed and voluntary staff vacancies here.
Staff Support
Ongoing support for the hospice team is an important aspect of palliative care provision. It has been long recognised that working in a hospice environment can be both physically and emotionally demanding and that stress and burnout are particularly common in palliative care settings.
The organisation has a responsibility to ensure occupational stress is minimised by developing and maintaining the use of ongoing staff support systems.
To maintain and develop such systems, St Andrew’s Hospice will:
- Promote and provide robust staff support practices ensuring every team member feels supported in their role
- Develop regular debriefing sessions to facilitate learning in complex cases
- Encourage the team to engage in health and safety issues and policy development to provide a safe working environment
- Enable the hospice team to access and utilise the existing staff support systems to promote wellbeing
- Actively promote the Appraisal/Performance Review & Development process to encourage individuals to identify their personal support needs.
Staff Governance
St Andrew’s Hospice endeavours to provide care encompassing human dignity, compassion, justice, advocacy and quality. In order to ensure our staff can deliver a quality service encompassing all aspects of our ethos, we have established staff governance standards.
We endeavour to ensure our staff are aware of and work to meet these governance standards by ensuring our staff are:
- Well informed
- Appropriately trained and developed
- Involved in decisions
- Treated fairly and consistently with dignity and respect in an environment where diversity is valued
- Provided with a continuously improving and safe working environment, promoting health and wellbeing of staff, patients and the wider community
- Aware of the Staff Forums and Open Meetings and how they can become involved.
The standard also requires all staff to:
- Keep themselves up to date with developments relevant to their role within the organisation
- Commit to continuous personal and professional development
- Adhere to the standards set by their regulatory bodies
- Actively participate in discussions or issues that affect them either directly or via their trade union/professional organisation
- Treat all staff and patients with dignity and respect while valuing diversity
- Ensure that their actions maintain and promote the health, safety and well being of all staff, patients and carers.
Learning & Development
St Andrew’s Hospice is responsible for all staff receiving the necessary induction and mandatory training to ensure the safe and efficient functioning of the service.
The hospice is also committed to the continuing professional development of our staff and offer the following:
- Statutory and mandatory training
- Short and long term education programmes
- Vocational courses
- Conferences and seminars
- Professional development programmes
- Management development programmes
- Mentoring, shadowing and coaching
- Performance Development Review
St Andrew’s Hospice is committed to continuing to develop our staff and each Line Manager ensures that staff’s performance is reviewed 6 monthly for new staff in the first instance and annually thereafter for all staff members within their department.
Individual staff members are responsible for demonstrating knowledge and skills through achieving agreed objectives. Staff are encouraged to retain evidence of personal development and should be able to reflect on how learning can be applied to working practice.