Dr. Margo Wrigley:

It is a lovely area to work in because one can do so much to help people and we have no problems recruiting staff. We started with just four whole-time equivalents and we now have 74 staff in place. With the passage of time, staff leave and we are able to fill posts as well. The person to explain this is my colleague, Ms Fiona O'Riordan, but she is not here. The voluntary hospitals do their own recruitment so we cannot take any credit for that. Ms O'Riordan is a master at working with the national recruitment service to recruit staff. We have been able to develop bespoke competitions say, for instance, for mental health nurses, psychology, occupational therapy and social work. We have developed those panels. The staff then know that they are not applying for one massive situation where any job can come up but are applying for posts in perinatal mental health. That initiative has been helpful.

We have had to work on things like having job descriptions that are clear so once staff come they know that not only are they working in an area that is lovely to work in but it is also a workplace where there is a lot of training and support provided for them. For instance, with the psychologist that came on board, we provided supervision from the UK because we do not have that expertise within the country although we are nearly there. We provided monthly supervision for a period of a year for our own six senior psychologists working for perinatal mental health. When one wraps it all up together as a package, it encourages recruitment.

The clinical programmes are attractive areas for staff to work in because they know that they will get a wraparound support when they come in to a clinical programme. That helps recruitment in mental health in general because, for those who work in the generality of services, it is nice to know that there are other opportunities to work in different areas and they are promotional opportunities. We do help recruitment as a whole.