ER casework at volume
Grievance, disciplinary and capability casework in environments that generate it continuously — including backlog clearance.
Learn more
Sector specialism
HR support for the NHSand social care.
Trusts, primary care networks, community providers and care organisations — where professional regulation, national pay structures and genuine 24/7 operating make every process harder than the textbook version.
What makes this sector different
Where health HR diverges.
Professional regulation sits alongside employment. When a registered professional is subject to an employment process, there is a parallel regulatory dimension — referral thresholds, interim conditions, and the interaction between an internal finding and a regulator's own process. Employment advice that ignores this can create a serious problem for both the organisation and the individual.
Agenda for Change constrains the obvious answers. Banding, job matching, incremental progression, unsocial hours and on-call arrangements are all governed by a national framework. A great deal of standard reward and restructuring advice simply does not survive contact with it.
Operational reality does not pause. A ward cannot stand down while a grievance is investigated. Suspension has immediate service consequences. Investigation meetings must be scheduled around rotas across three shifts. Good process design in health has to account for the service continuing throughout — which is a planning problem as much as a legal one.
Who we work with
NHS trusts and foundation trusts, primary care networks and GP practices, community and mental health providers, residential and domiciliary care organisations, and voluntary sector health and care bodies. Smaller providers — care homes, GP practices, PCNs — are frequent clients precisely because they carry NHS-adjacent complexity without an NHS-scale HR function.
How we help
Health and care HR,
both pillars.
Regulatory interface
Employment processes involving registered professionals, handled with proper attention to referral duties and parallel regulatory action.
Rota, rostering & working time
Disputes and structural problems around rotas, on-call, unsocial hours and working time in continuous-service environments.
Service reconfiguration
Transfers between providers, service redesign and integration programmes, with consultation run to a defensible timetable.
Learn more
Policies for health & care
Policy suites and contracts written against Agenda for Change or your own terms, including the care sector's specific pressures.
Learn more
Interim health HR
ER caseworkers, business partners and interim HR leads with genuine NHS or care sector delivery behind them.
Learn more
Case studies
How it looks in practice.
What we have been brought in to do for NHS and care providers, and how it ended.
NHS & Social Care
Clearing an employee relations backlog in a community health provider
SituationA community NHS provider with more than forty open ER cases, some over a year old, and an HR team of three.
Our roleTwo interim ER caseworkers within a week, a triage framework, and a senior practitioner reviewing the oldest cases.
ResultBacklog cleared in four months; the trust's own team kept the triage model.
Read the case study
NHS & Social Care
Interim Head of HR for a care provider mid-way through a CQC improvement plan
SituationA residential care provider lost its Head of HR at short notice with a CQC action plan, a TUPE transfer and a pay review all live.
Our roleAn interim Head of HR in post within eight days, with our senior practitioner as a sounding board on the transfer.
ResultAll three workstreams delivered; a permanent appointment recruited and handed over to.
Read the case study
Anonymised composites — assembled from the kind of work we do, with identifying details changed and no client named. How we handle case studies.
FAQs
Sector
questions.
Yes. Residential and domiciliary care providers are a significant part of this practice. They face the same workforce pressures and much of the same regulatory complexity, usually with far less HR infrastructure than an NHS trust.
Care sector work also brings its own issues — CQC interfaces, sponsorship and right to work at scale, and very high turnover — which we handle routinely.
Talk to someone who already knows the framework.
A free 30-minute call. No introduction to your sector required.
Prefer email? hello@civitashr.co.uk · Or call 020 0000 0000