Employee Service Centre – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

Corporate Services

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

Firstly, I recognise that, in a pandemic year, every accolade possible should go to our amazing NHS clinical staff; however, my nomination is for an NHS administrative team that, in my opinion, has truly gone above and beyond to assist the pandemic response of my Trust. The team are, by absolute definition, unsung heroes in my eyes, and the eyes of lots of people across Bolton NHS Foundation Trust. I am nominating the Trust's Employee Service Centre (ESC) who are responsible for recruitment and staff contractual changes amongst other things. In March 20, as the pandemic rapidly began to escalate in the UK, the team quickly identified the need to assist clinical colleagues by centralising all recruitment activity within the ESC to free up vital clinical time; and also the need to implement 'fast-track' recruitment processes to facilitate quicker recruitment (the decision to do so was also nationally mandated by the NHS Employers organisation in April 20 which demonstrates the ESC forward-thinking!). This offer was well received by our clinical colleagues. Alongside this the ESC: launched a 'Team Bolton' recruitment campaign to try to manage the influx of offers of help we were receiving, supported the deployment of student nurses/midwives/AHPs/and Medical students into clinical paid employment, and recruited/hired countless ex-employees who wanted to come back and help, all alongside all our ‘normal’ recruitment. The ESC team managed all of this work efficiently, effectively, and above all helpfully, supporting each other with regular check-in meetings. Recruitment activity throughout the pandemic was incredibly busy and incredibly important to support the care our patients receive and our staff themselves. The increased activity and workload described above has continued throughout the pandemic (Bolton and the NW have seen up to 4 separate ‘waves’ of pandemic pressure) and, when broken down, the work the team have delivered is simply staggering: - Between March-20 and March-21 the team: Recruited 1430 new starters (including 287 deployed students as mentioned above), and created 2257 new assignments on our HR/Payroll system (i.e. additional posts for existing staff); of which 1238 were new bank posts. The team have received countless emails from Divisions thanking them for their support and I hope this nomination gets across how proud I am of them all. They would be very embarrassed to win this award, as they work hard because they absolutely want to support the Trust, our staff and our patients not to win awards or get accolades. But I know they would be secretly delighted to win and to be nominated.