Living Library
Project background: What and Why
Colleagues at the University of Aberdeen recently completed a piece of research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research titled ‘Come and work here!’. The team identified that much of the previous research on recruitment and retention of health and care staff in remote and rural areas concentrated on the organisations and the practitioners, and far less was centred around the communities and the people within them.
The team conducted interviews with over 30 people in remote and rural communities who had been involved in recruitment and retention initiatives in their areas. This was to explore their experiences of trying to attract health and care staff, map the local context and describe any initiatives undertaken, and understand how these initiatives had been received by the staff who had been recruited.
Project description: Who and How
One of the outputs from the project is a portfolio of initiatives described by the participants which the team have asked the National Centre to assist in disseminating. The portfolio includes linked examples such as videos, websites and news articles evidencing the initiatives in action.
Using this portfolio of initiatives, the National Centre team will design and create an online ‘Living Library’ based in the Turas platform, that colleagues across Scotland can reference and potentially trial in their own areas. This structured, evidence-based approach is key to the National Centre’s objectives and colleagues will be encouraged to provide feedback on their experiences of using the various tools and initiatives to enable further evidence to be gathered on their effectiveness.
Expected outcome: When and What Difference
The design and creation of the Living Library will be completed during 2024/25 and will link with the ‘Implementing Making it Work’ project.
Designing and developing an evidence-based menu of strategies and initiatives that is freely available to all will provide practitioners across Scotland with an invaluable resource to draw from when considering recruitment and retention in their areas.
Across Scotland, pockets of brilliant work are happening in terms of recruitment and retention. This project pulls together all that great work and showcases it in one easy-to-access library, enabling colleagues to browse through a range of options and decide what is practical and possible to implement within their own contexts. The project will also grow the volume of evidence in this field by encouraging colleagues to provide their own feedback and submit additional initiatives which can then be used as case studies and other learning materials.
