Resources
The practical resources below can help you to strengthen this area of CQC inspection.
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Resource creator: Skills for Care
Skills for Care has developed an Induction toolkit to help managers plan and deliver a high-quality induction that fully supports new starters to quickly settle into their roles. It offers the opportunity to provide a robust induction to fully support new starters and ensure you create the right first impression. This covers from pre-arrival through to the sixth month of employment - to ensure you are providing a robust and supportive induction.
The Induction toolkit is aimed at helping managers support all staff, regardless of whether they are joining the sector for the first time or they are a highly experienced new team member. The toolkit includes checklists at each stage of the process to provide lists of activities to consider with signposts to resources and templates which you can tailor. It draws heavily on what providers across health and social care tell us works for them.
Date published: May 2024
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This guide outlines the barriers, success factors and key principles for recruiting these groups into the sector. It explores how we can more effectively engage with men and young people.
Date published: April 2024
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This guide supports employers to think about safer employment processes from recruitment to retention to managing leavers. It gives an overview of the PRISIM model of safer employment and signposts to resources and tools to enable you to develop safer employment practices and a safer employment culture in the workplace.
Date published: April 2024
Resource creator: DHSC
The Department of Health and Social Care’s national adult social care recruitment campaign aims to support adult social care employers to recruit the dedicated staff you need to fill your vacancies.
To accompany the campaign, a suite of new, free resources has been created to help you advertise your job opportunities locally. The campaign raises awareness of the rewarding nature of care work and tackles the concerns that research shows potential applicants may have.
Date published: October 2023
Resource creator: Better Hiring Institute
This Better Hiring Toolkit provides simple guidance to support you to both obtain and provide effective references and conduct information.
At the heart of the Toolkit is the safety of the people who employers are entrusted to care for and the staff who carry out this role. Those responsible for recruiting or supervising staff or volunteers, have an obligation to conduct a safe and fair recruitment process and ensure that pre-employment checks are robust so that your organisation safeguards the people being supported.
The Better Hiring Toolkit for Care is free to use and has handy templates throughout for you to use within your organisation.
Date published: January 2023
Resource creator: Skills for Care, Health Education England and DHSC
The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training aims to provide the health and care workforce with the right skills and knowledge to provide safe, compassionate and informed care to autistic people and people with a learning disability.
Date published: October 2022
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This short guide can help if you recruit young workers. It covers what you need to arrange if you employ staff under 18 years to work at your service and outlines the benefits for employers.
Date published: December 2020
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This guidance advises how you can attract a diverse range of candidates for your roles and hire people previously underrepresented in your workforce. Including:
- Recruiting temporary staff
- Employing people with criminal records
- Employing people with disabilities
- Employing 16-17 year olds
Date published: December 2020
Resource creator: Skills for Care, Skills for Health, Health Education England
The ‘tailoring the Care Certificate’ resources have been developed to support workers in achieving the minimum standards of the Care Certificate in job roles where more specialist skills are needed. They can be used for workers who are new to care, or who are moving from one area of care into a more specialised service.
As well as being used by the learner, they can also be used by the trainer and assessor or to enhance existing Care Certificate delivery and assessment. They aren’t a mandatory resource and don’t replace any aspects or content of the Care Certificate.
Date published: April 2020
Resource creator: Skills for Care
You can use these resources to get the most of your application process. Ask potential candidates the right questions to help you with the candidate selection process.
You can also assess candidates suitability by including your organisation’s values and behaviours in your application process and asking candidates to evidence how they've demonstrated their values.
Date published: December 2019
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This template can help you identify what recruitment activities are working well so you can invest more in getting it right, or where it isn’t working well so you can reduce costs. You can use and adapt this template to calculate the costs of recruitment in your service over the past 12-months.
Date published: December 2019
Resource creator: Skills for Care
We did some research with social care organisations with a turnover of less than 10% to see how they successfully recruit and retain staff. Some of their ‘secrets of success’ include:
- recruiting people with the right values and behaviours, who are more likely to stay
- understanding your local area to inform business planning
- using innovative strategies to attract candidates from the local community
- offering quality training, positive working conditions, flexible working and competitive pay rates.
Date published: April 2019
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This practical guide will help you to consider what learning and development can be offered and how to select and purchase it. It provides information on:
- identifying the learning needs of your workers
- the different types of learning available
- what training should be regularly refreshed
- questions you need to ask to develop a learning package
- how to evaluate learning and development.
Date published: April 2019
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This resource, part of our ‘Good and outstanding care’ range, looks at recommendations and practical examples from services on how to safely recruit and retain staff. It covers:
- safe recruitment practices
- how to calculate how many staff you need
- how to ensure new staff are safe and competent
- contingency planning.
Date published: November 2018
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This guide supports employers to reach the potential of people with convictions by implementing safe and fair recruitment policies and procedures. It can help you recruit from a wider talent pool and attract a diverse range of candidates.
The guide includes advice on:
- safer recruitment checklist
- criminal records checks
- data protection and record keeping
- useful contacts
Date published: October 2018
Resource creator: Skills for Care
It’s important that you effectively train and assess your staff, including assessing competence in the workplace. Whether you're assessing new staff against the Care Certificate or existing staff, the workplace assessment guide (£20 or £15 to registered manager members) is packed with insights from award-winning employers and learning providers.
Date published: April 2016
Resource creator: Skills for Care
Our ‘Practical approaches to workforce planning’ supports workforce planning using the ‘analyse, plan, do, review’ method. These resources have been designed to help you create a clear picture of what your organisation looks like now, so you can think about and plan for the future by completing some of the key tasks.
Date published: December 2015
Resource creator: Skills for Care
This is the list of resources to support the nursing workforce and guidance provider may need when employing Nurses. This section includes information on:
- Education and practice standards for nurses working in care homes
- Registered nurses
- Nursing associates
- Student nurse placements
- We Are Social Care Nursing
- Return to practice
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