CNWL Experts by Experience leading the way in recruitment

Like many NHS Trusts, Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) involves service users and carers - our Experts by Experience (EbEs) - in staff recruitment, and their insight is invaluable.

Inspired by a suggestion from the Chief Medical Officer, we’ve taken this further.

As well as being valued panel members, our Experts by Experience are now trained and supported to chair Consultant recruitment panels. After completing their training and shadowing an experienced chair, they now confidently lead the final interviews. They sit alongside Directors, Executives and service leads, and help us choose the people who will shape CNWL’s future.

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Con Kelly says:

“Having Experts by Experience on interview panels helps us get to what really matters; it helps us tease out which candidates are going to be good with staff, good with patients, good with carers. The evidence is clear that if you live our Trust values, you will get better outcomes for service users and carers, so why would we not want to do that? I’ve also been struck by how many candidates have given us positive feedback at walking into a panel that’s chaired by a service user or carer, because it sets out from the very beginning what we expect of them and how this organisation works.”

Janet Seale, one of our regular Panel Chairs and CWNL Carer Expert by Experience and Governor shares more: 

“Chairing panels has been a good experience. It shows candidates how important working with patients and carers is to CNWL. As a Chair, I work closely with other panel members who each bring their areas of expertise and we discuss and decide as a team who is best to appoint. As Chair, it’s important to be confident and honest with your opinions about each candidate.”

To help with this, we have trained an additional group of Experts by Experience to chair panels and co-produced a guide for Expert by Experience Chairs.

We’ve also co-produced a bank of interview questions that can be used in any staff interviews, reflecting the questions that matter most to people using services.

We have shared learning with West London NHS Foundation Trust and held a joint training event with them.

Lucy Palmer, Head of Patient and Carer Involvement summarises next steps:

“Every great service starts with the right people. Experts by Experience help us recruit the very best by bringing views to the panel that you won’t get elsewhere. To make sure that an EbE voice is part of your next panel (for any role) email involvement.cnwl@nhs.net”