John Taylor Hospice

John Taylor Hospice is an organisation with a long and fascinating history. “We were gifted into the National Health Service in 1948 and were managed by the NHS until 2011,” states Penny Venables, CEO of John Taylor Hospice, “so a lot of our HR and the work that we currently now do with Croner was previously managed by the NHS.

“We came out of the NHS in 2011 because of government legislation and established ourselves as a community interest company, until this year, where we changed into a charity as with recent changes to VAT rules for charitable hospices, that model was felt to be more helpful to us.”

The hospice provides a full range of services to patients, and with that comes a lot of different workers to look after. “The majority of our work is in the community, but we do have an inpatient ward, and we look after about 600 patients at any one time. We have a big community nursing team, an allied health professional team, a hospice-at-home team, a wellbeing team, and a full range of day services. Overall, we currently have 139 employees with about 80 volunteers on top of that.”

John Taylor Hospice has had access to Croner's online management system since 2017, and have utilised most of the services Croner have to offer. Above all else, Penny praises the advice line, stating that it is “extremely helpful” in answering the large number of queries they receive. “A large number of the queries are around employment law and rights in areas such as sickness absence, maternity leave and contracts. It has been really helpful to have access to immediate advice on queries and also ongoing support for some of the more complex cases.”

“We’ve used the advice line a lot and we are really pleased with the service,” says Penny, “at the moment we’re mostly calling up for HR and legal advice around individual cases.

“We use the online management system as our primary workforce database. Gail, our Director of Corporate Services who manages HR, uses it and so do our managers and the workforce team. As part of the package we get access to the Reward service which is very helpful, as it gives me access to information on pay benchmarking and salary surveys that I can share with the board.”

Penny also has regular contact with a Reward consultant, “The Reward consultant is our main contact for our recent exercise around job evaluation, she has been great— she certainly knows her stuff. We’ve been very impressed with her level of knowledge and she’s helped us understand the system. We have been really pleased with the support we have received, the evaluation we have is a good package and I’d certainly recommend it to people who need assistance with their pay & reward schemes.”

Penny’s plans for the future relationship of Croner and the hospice involve expanding usage of the Croner system, and making it more easily accessible for everyone within the business who would benefit from its use.

“I would recommend working with Croner, I’m hoping we can continue working proactively with each other. We’d like to expand on our current usage of the online management system and work with Croner to see how it can best benefit us as we move forward with the self-service element.”