Working Within The H&S Sector

• CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development and is a process of developing and maintaining professional knowledge, expertise, and competence in the field of health and social care. It helps healthcare professionals to stay up to date with the latest developments in their field so that they can provide the best possible care to their patients and clients. CPD activities can include attending seminars, conferences, workshops, or online courses, reading relevant journals, or engaging in independent study.
• Health practitioners

  • Must have a DBS check
  • Reasons why
• Mandatory safeguarding training is important
• Employment contract

  • An agreement between two sides
  • Legally binding if employer accepts job offer
  • Informs employee of employment conditions, rights, responsibilities and duties
• Terms and conditions

  • Employer and employee must stick to until contract ends
  • Notice period if employee leaves early
  • Employer may end employment through redundancy or dismissal
  • Contract terms may change and need to be agreed
• Types of legal terms

  • Written contract or statement
  • Verbal agreement
  • Job offer letter/email
  • Employer handbook, notice board, intranet
• Collective agreements

  Negotiated between employer, employee and trade unions
• Job description


  Details the role and personal specification
• Collective agreement terms

  • Employees should not steal from employer
  • Driving licence may be required
  • Employer must provide safe and healthy environment
  • Holiday entitlement or annual bonus
• Employers must provide a principal statement on the first day of work
• Induction

  Introduction to the workplace
• Probationary period


  Period to assess if employment contract is working out
• Employer requirements

  • Provide sick pay procedures
  • Provide other paid leave like maternity/paternity
• Performance reviews

  1. Reflection, feedback and improvement

  2. Communication

  3. Standards and expectations
• Supervision

  Mentoring an employee until they gain required skills
• Appraisal

  Assessment of employee performance
• CPD

  Continuous Professional Development
• Disciplinary policy

  Outlines expectations and standards, must be fair and non-discriminatory
• Disciplinary procedure

  1. Outlines expected behaviour and potential sanctions

  2. Employee can invite representative

  3. Can result in no action, warnings or dismissal

  4. Employee has right to appeal
• Grievance policy

  Responsibility of employer to address and resolve employee concerns
• Potential grievance issues

  • Terms and conditions
  • Health and safety
  • Relationships with colleagues/management
  • Bullying and harassment
  • Working practices
  • Working environment
  • Changes in organisation
  • Discrimination
  • Issues with manager
• ACAS provides codes of practice on disciplinary/grievance procedures, collective bargaining, flexible working
• Equality, diversity and inclusion policy

  • Complies with legislation
  • Ensures fair and equitable treatment
  • Prevents prejudice and discrimination
  • Promotes social inclusion
  • Tackles the cycle of disadvantage
  • Promotes respecting, celebrating and valuing of individuals
• Safeguarding policies

  • Provides guidelines on what the organisation needs to do to protect individuals' health, wellbeing and human rights
  • Ensures the protection from harm of individuals, including those working within the organisation, service users and visitors
  • Outlines the roles of different agencies involved in safeguarding (for example local authority adult social care services and children and young people social care services, GPs, hospitals, education settings, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC))
• Employment contracts

  Setting out employment conditions, rights, responsibilities and duties
• Performance reviews

  • Evaluating work performance against standards and expectations
  • Facilitating feedback to improve
  • Providing opportunities to raise concerns or issues
  • Contributing to continuing professional development (CPD)
• Disciplinary policy


  • Setting and maintaining expected standards of work and conduct
  • Ensuring consistent and fair treatment
  • Establishing a sequence for disciplinary action
• Grievance policy

  • Providing opportunities for employees to confidentially raise and address grievances
  • Establishing a sequence for raising grievances
• The importance of adhering to quality standards, quality management and audit processes within the health and science sector:

  • ensuring consistency

  • maintaining health and safety

  • monitoring processes and procedures

  • facilitating continuous improvement

  • facilitating objective, independent reviews (for example enquiries into failures in safeguarding
• Ethics

  Doing things correctly, following a moral code or principles to ensure shared goals
• Beneficence


  Practicing in a good and ethical way, considering best interests of patients
• Maleficence


  Doing harm or being inconsiderate, opposite of nursing 6 C's
• Non-maleficence

  Not doing harm
• Autonomy


  Being given the right to choose and make decisions about your own care
• Informed consent


  Patient is given all relevant information to assess pros and cons of a procedure/treatment
• Capacity


  Ability to understand information, retain it, evaluate it, and communicate a decision
• If individual lacks capacity

  Principles of beneficence and non-maleficence should be applied
• Lack of capacity is due to lack of intelligence, competence and understanding
• Reflective practice

  Reflecting on what happened, feelings, what could be done differently, implementing change
• Confidentiality


  Maintaining privacy and only sharing information when necessary