Northern Care Alliance | Pre-Employment Programmes - Northern Care Alliance

This is the place to jump start your NHS career

Explore a place where future careers are made possible. At the Northern Care Alliance, we provide a range of career and work experience programmes to grow the employment prospects of our local community. We’re committed to improving the life opportunities, inclusion, social mobility and health and wellbeing of our local population and offer a number of pathways for local people to access NHS careers and develop in their role.

If you are a job seeker looking to gain employment, learn new skills of gain exposure to the world of healthcare, this page is for you.

Community Engagement

We are proud to work with key partners across Greater Manchester to help local people on their journey towards getting a job in health and care.

We have been highly commended for our approach to local recruitment [Workforce Initiative of the year, HSJ Awards, 2023].

This recognition has stemmed from our partnership with Greater Manchester Integrated Care, and the delivery of community-based recruitment events.

Through these events we have been able to meet with hundreds of people from our local areas to find out about opportunities in health and social care, apply for a job, or leave with a plan to secure a job.

We look forward to helping more people in our local areas to jump start their career in health and care as we plan more dates for the future.

Disadvantaged Groups

Working in partnership with local stakeholder agencies, teams and charities, we offer work experience and widen the opportunities for the following groups:

Young people in care or care leavers
Local unemployed people
Military Veterans and their families
People with disabilities
Young carers
NEETs – those young people (16-19 years old) not in employment, education or training
Members of the BAME community

Supported Internship

Supported Internship

Each one of our Care Organisations run a supported internship programme. This is a year-long internship for young people with a learning disability (age 18-24) and is operated in partnership with local educational providers and/or the charity Pure Innovations. The internship programme combines classroom study, with three placements in real job roles across our hospital sites. This work and study time is invaluable. It enables our interns to gain the skills, confidence and qualifications necessary to step into paid employment at the end of the programme. We’ve had, and continue to have, huge successes with this programme. And, it’s a pleasure to see our young people step into a paid NHS career as a direct result of it.

Pre-employment programmes

To make sure that the NCA is adding value and support to our neighbouring communities, we run a range of pre-employment programmes to give disadvantaged social groups a foot in the door within the NHS. These are mainly focused at helping local unemployed people, who are interested in working in the NHS but perhaps lacking the work experience necessary for their job application to be successful.

Our pre-employment programmes are as follows:

Pre-employment programme (Bury & Rochdale and Oldham)
The Prince’s Trust Get into Hospital Services Programme (People aged 18-30)
The Sector Based Work Academy pre-employment programme (Salford)

These programmes provide the opportunity to make a real positive difference in someone’s life, and can act as a stepping-stone, out of unemployment. We continue to work with partners to extend this offer.