Hazeltree Care Services
Modern Slavery
Statement
“Our underlying ethos is the delivery of care, to our service users, their families and our team”
We are committed to identifying, preventing and monitoring risks of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour in our supply chain and operations.
The protection from Slavery & Human Trafficking will always remain at the heart of our commitment to meeting with all legal requirements of the care industry and with our own emphasis on ensuring that our reporting standards and training delivery are amongst our everyday priorities.
Ensuring our commitment:
Supply Chain:
Recruitment – Our employees are recruited using stringent recruitment processes ensuring the identity of the individual is checked and their right to work alongside careful consideration for the roles they are being employed for, not only for their abilities to deliver outstanding care, to our service users but also that the potential employee is able to work for their own benefit free from any risk of slavey and trafficking. Hazeltree Care Services will only use a reputable recruitment agency when dealing with third parties for Human Resources, when an individual applies every effort is made to ensure they are legally allowed to work and that there is no risk of them being forced into employment for exploitation.
Services Suppliers – Ensuring that our Service suppliers also work towards the protection against Slavery & Human Trafficking, is as important to us as the quality of the service provided. Hazeltree Care Services will never employ the services of a supplier that we believe may exploit its workforce and will seek to report our concerns whenever a suspicion arises. we predominantly use UK based suppliers and endeavour to develop close ties with them in order to keep our supply chain relatively short.
Slavery and human trafficking risk mapping - We continue to use the expertise of key stakeholders to help us to identify areas for action, including reviewing the risks of slavery and human trafficking in our supply chains but, also, closer to home, in our recruitment process.
Training:
Continuous delivery of quality training such as prevent Duty annually, supported by rigorous monitoring ensures that there is a thorough understanding of the requirements by law. It also provides our Service Users with a dedicated team of professionals that will strive to ensure the protection of our Service Users at all times.
Modern slavery policy – Modern slavery awareness now forms part of our induction programme for all our front line staff. For current employees, our modern slavery policy forms part of our main employee handbook and we are introducing a programme to raise awareness of it, having promoted it to all our employees when it was first introduced in 2018.
Our training delivery also covers those whom provide services to us, giving guidance on signs of abuse that they may recognise in order to report to the respective authorities.
Whistle-blowing procedures are paramount to our organisation, all of our workforce understands their duty to report anything that raises concern; for their Services Users, their fellow colleagues and from our Service Suppliers.
Services Users:
The life blood of our organisation, the reason Hazeltree Care Services exists is to provide care and support to vulnerable people. Their safety and wellbeing is the highest of our priorities, we will always ensure their safety and protection. Hazeltree Care Services has invested heavily in ensuring that the policies and procedures used are continually reviewed and updated, our workforce all ready and sign to state they have read and understand these policies and procedures as well as routinely receiving refresher training throughout the year. We ensure comprehension of all policies inclusive of our modern slavery policy through staff supervisions
Effective Action Taken:
Hazeltree Care Services has been very fortunate that we are yet to encounter a person or Service Provider that raised concerns of Modern Slavery or Human Trafficking. However we are always actively looking for any signs of this activity for the protection of everyone under Hazeltree Care Services remit. The implementation of our polices and procedures linked to the regular training activities have supported this monitoring by the team and given them the knowledge and tools to identify and report when required.
Whist we are proud of the steps we have taken above, we realise that it is just the start of the journey and over the next 12 months we will not only ensure that the work done to date is reinforced, but also continue to consider how this can be improved upon going forward. In particular we are looking at introducing an electronic risk register of suppliers and potential suppliers and will continue the introduction of contractual obligations on our suppliers around modern slavery.