4 Most Important Reasons For A Compliance Audit in Healthcare Recruitment

Healthcare recruitment in the UK has grown exponentially over the past two years. The industry has evolved into a complex and sophisticated system with various outputs and inputs involved and millions of stakeholders who are all responsible in some manner for how the industry is managed, supported and developed.

Healthcare employees have been more important than ever in recent times and their value has been demonstrated time and time again. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of healthcare workers once again, especially as they have worked to preserve the standard of care that people demand.

Recruiting within the healthcare sector in the UK can be challenging as there are more jobs available than candidates and whilst current healthcare recruitment agencies in the UK may be providing workers, it may be that they're not fully compliant with the law or there is inconsistency of quality delivery.

To ensure you have the best candidates for healthcare jobs, we recommend you perform frequent legal compliance audits, typically every 6 months. Recruitment agency audits can be performed to promote quality improvement in your recruitment strategy to understand the performance of your suppliers and to ensure full compliance to current legislations and recruitment best practices as well as to check that your recruitment agency suppliers have the necessary tools and knowledge available to them to maintain these standards.

Below we discuss 4 key reasons why you should perform healthcare recruitment agency audits:

1. Eliminate legal risks

Recruitment agency audits can assist you in achieving a number of goals, including ensuring legal compliance, identifying gaps in processes and skills, assisting in maintaining or improving a competitive advantage, establishing efficient documentation and technology practices. Identifying strengths and weaknesses in training, communications, and other employment practices. Recruitment agency audits can also help rule out any legal risks such as illegal workers, employees without contracts and false self-employment and payments made via umbrella companies.

2. Prevent Operational Delays

From registration to certification and completing relevant checks prior to employment, ensuring the right processes are in place means no surprise hold ups. Recruitment agency audits are vital to identify bottlenecks and highlight which aspects of your process can be improved.

3. Significant cost savings

When companies are looking to cut costs, recruitment costs are often underestimated. This leads to poor decisions that often fail to reduce costs, or even make them worse. By reviewing each healthcare agency supplier and cross-referencing workers’ pay slips, you can identify any overpayments and credit them back so you’re not out of pocket.

4. Avoid Bad press

By periodically conducting all legal and best practice checks, Recruitment agency audit checks protect your brand and reputation avoiding any bad press or naming and shaming.

What issues might arise if healthcare recruitment agencies aren't audited?

In our experience, even some of the best agencies miss some of the necessary checks in their first audit. It's unusual for agencies to pass their first audit with 100% compliance.

Here are some of the common things that we find;

• Missing or unsigned criminal conviction declarations
• No retained copies of qualifications, certificates or licenses
• Missing application form
• No evidence of reference checks (unless there is evidence of reference requests)
• Missing or unsigned 48 hour opt out agreement
• No health and safety or risk assessment in place
• No insurance or insurance that is not in line with contract
• Lower pay slip pay rate than listed on the online portal record
• Pay type mismatch (for example listing as PAYE but paying limited)
• No record of a face-to-face interview
• Absence of a medical questionnaire
• Missing pay slips

If you need help conducting recruitment agency audits, please get in touch!

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