South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust – Veteran Friendly
Darren Phillips Served for 24 years with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and Royal Logistic Corps, before leaving in 2008. He is now the business support manager and Armed Forces Champion with the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Here he tells us about the trust’s enthusiasm for employing Service-leavers and Veterans.
I took on the mantle of Armed Forces Covenant Management Champion for the whole trust back in 2019. For the past 12 months I’ve mainly been focused on Veteran patients. Now I want to see what we can do to employ Veterans.
Being ex-Military, I know what we’ve got to offer. When I was working at a different trust, I put a job advert out for people to work in the theatre stores. We were getting hundreds of applications. So, if people didn’t have the educational requirements, you didn’t put them through. One chap’s CV came up. He was a former Colour Sergeant, but he hadn’t put any education down. However, I knew that to be a Colour Sergeant, you had to do your education for promotion, which is equivalent to GCSE’s. Furthermore, one of his roles, was Company Quartermaster Sergeant, so I knew that he’d worked in stores as well.
For those two reasons, I put him through and he ended up getting the job after interview. A civvy would probably have just knocked him off.
Why work in the NHS?
We’re helping people. It’s good to be able to give something back. And working with the NHS has got a lot of benefits as well. I missed the camaraderie and things like that from the Forces, but the NHS has a very similar humour to the Military.
The NHS is a fantastic career path. I think a lot of people don’t look at it because they see the NHS as just for doctors or nurses. Of course, you’ve got porters, you’ve got the estates, you’ve got carpenters, you’ve got painters, you’ve got electricians, we’ve got the finance department, human resources, procurement and stores. All those jobs exist in the Military. There’s a role in the NHS for everybody. It’s the people in the background that provide the services for those medical people to do their job. Plus, there are benefits, such as a brilliant pension and generous annual leave.
What can you tell us specifically about the South West Yorkshire Partnership Foundation Trust?
It’s a mental health trust. Going back to the Falklands War, there are a lot of ex-Forces personnel experiencing mental health issues and there hasn’t been a lot of help out there.
I was the trust’s first Veterans champion and as a mental health trust, we’re doing a lot to help and signpost people into our services and obviously into Op Courage and elsewhere.
Why is the trust so enthusiastic about employing Veterans?
It’s just the variety of valuable transferable skills they’ve got. You find that Veterans are dedicated, motivated, good at problem solving, have excellent organisational skills, pay attention to detail and are good at teambuilding. We’ve just got so many transferable skills that the NHS really could use.
South West Yorkshire is a fantastic NHS trust to work for. It puts a lot of good into the community, so it’s a very worthwhile career with progression available in every role.
