Using Photography to support recruitment in the NHS
I am so excited to share the results of a Photovoice project that I facilitated for Airedale NHS Trust with you in this blog post! I was invited to work alongside staff in the Communities Teams to use photographs as a means of visualising their thoughts and experiences of working for the NHS. The ultimate goal of the project was to create some materials that could support recruitment by highlighting the real stories of people within the Trust.
I started my journey with Photovoice as a methodology for working in community settings - primarily as a means for people to share their thoughts and feelings on the subjects that are important to them. I’ve been struck by the power of this approach to enable connection and communication from a different perspective.
During my career I’ve gained many insights into the ways that organisations operate, especially how relationships and communication are just as vital inside an institution as they are outside. If we consider that organisations are where people gather to do stuff, then it stands to reason that many of the principles of Photovoice are applicable in an organisational context too.
Over the course of the project we considered different perspectives on life in and outside of work underneath the banner of 'What does working for the NHS mean to me’? We did this by examining how images can be used to tell stories before identifying some matters of interest for each person to focus their attention on and finally created captions to go along with their chosen photos.
I was blown away by the breadth and depth of photos and captions that were created in this project! I am so grateful to everyone who took part for embracing the approach and sharing their amazing stories and wonderful images!
Below you can see some of the photographs and captions created by the photographers who took part in the project, click on the images to view a larger version.
We asked the photographers for their thoughts on taking part:
We shared the photographs with a group of NHS staff to show what had been created and to seek some feedback, I was struck by the reactions of people from different parts of the organisation who as well as being inspired and moved by the emotional aspect of the photographs, they also started to identify ways that these images could support their own work such as being included in induction sessions for new staff, being used during senior leadership meetings as a guide for strategic decision making and as learning aid when running staff training.
It was wonderful to see people thinking about how they could use these photographs to support their day to day work - this is what photovoice is all about, growing conversations and inviting people to consider the world (and themselves) from another point of view and as a resource to be actively used and engaged with over time.
Feedback from the management team who commissioned the project has also been very positive:
“It has been a really positive experience working with Our Creative Connection. You have been completely engaged and invested in our vision of trying something new and innovative, not only to help recruit and retain staff but also giving people an alternative way of expressing themselves about what’s important to them. The results were powerful and compelling and stimulated lots of ideas about how the images and words generated might be used together or separately in any number of ways.”
It’s been a real privilege to have been invited to deliver this project, I am hugely grateful to the Trudy, Lorna and the management team at Airedale NHS Trust for putting their faith in me and the photovoice method and of course to all of the people who participated in the project, engaging with the content and embracing the approach in such a meaningful way.