Funding from the Department of Health and Social Care was provided in 2023-24 to help develop solutions to local challenges around the use of international recruitment and strengthen safeguards against exploitation.
“Prior to international recruitment, we had to hand back care hours to local authorities due to the lack of staff. Since recruiting internationally, we have been able to provide 100% of all packages against the care frameworks they have with local authorities.”
Waheed Azam, Operations Director, at Nationwide Care Services
Our programme activity focused on:
- Applying national standards to establish positive recruitment and selection practices – with a focus on ethical recruitment practice.
- Establishing an HR Advisory and International Recruitment Hub to support care providers with international recruitment.
- Collaborating at regional and local levels with partners across the West Midlands, such as care associations, West Midlands Employers and Citizens Advice Bureau to share support and best practice.
- Distribution of small grants to support local projects.
Extending collaboration is one of the West Midlands ADASS building blocks for resilience in adult social care and has been a principle used within the International Recruitment Project.
Support for Care Providers
In addition to the local support offer, managed by local authorities themselves using the small grants, we focused on developing a regional offer. This included the development of:
WM Social Care International Recruitment Hub
Our partners, West Midlands Employers, developed the IR Hub to provide information, advice, and guidance on international recruitment to CQC accredited adult care providers and councils operating in the West Midlands. It had four key components:
- Free legal and HR specialist support, including helplines and webinars
- 30-minutes of free legal advice for each care provider, until the end of June 2024 (now extended until the end of June 2025)
- A framework of ‘approved’ ethical recruitment managed service providers/agencies
- Compliance Guidance – providing guidance and tips on best practice to help sponsors to comply with their Right to Work responsibilities and to effectively prepare for Home Office inspections
International Recruitment Dashboard
Our international recruitment dashboard has been developed to support local authorities and care providers with adherence to legislation, sponsorship regulation and ethical recruitment.
The dashboard has been shared with DHSC who are now using it at a National level to support the mitigation of IR risks across all regions in England.
Find out how local authorities are using it to get intelligence on people and providers involved in their localities on this page with further information about the IR dashboard.
Key learnings from phase 1 of the WM-ADASS IR programme
We evaluated use of the the DHSC International Recruitment Fund in 2023-24 in our May 2024 report, Creating a sustainable adult social care workforce: international recruitment in West Midlands learning & evaluation. Get further information on the learning & evaluation report and access a download link here.