Saving Valuable Staff Time

Dianne Bulmer

Senior Recruitment Services Advisor

About the Organisation: Epworth Healthcare is the biggest not-for-profit private Health Care Group in Victoria. They run 11 health care facilities throughout the Melbourne and Geelong regions and employ almost 7300 staff as an organisation. 

Their people and culture team has 59 staff members. As a group of hospitals, they pride themselves on embracing evidence-based medicine as well as integrating their research, education, and practice to ensure their patients are cared for. 

Pain Point: With thousands of employees, Epworth found that they were spending significant amounts of time on their visa compliance program. At the point of hire, someone on the recruitment team was running a manual Vevo check through the government website. 

Every three months, a staff member spent 1-week full time running compliance checks on all of the visa holding employees. Even with this amount of time and resources dedicated to this function, data slipped through the cracks. This is because significant changes to visas could happen within a three month period that the recruitment team at Epworth would not be aware of during that period of time. 

Solution: Epworth Health Care decided they wanted to implement a technology solution that would help them minimize their administrative time on this function while maximising the accuracy of their data. Check Work Rights provided them with the perfect solution to help them achieve these goals. 

The team at Epworth now uses an iPad to check employees’ visa status during their employment onboarding. Using the ongoing monitoring, Epworth especially benefits from the notifications features that Check Work Rights ongoing monitoring features provide.

They also eliminate the risk associated with having to wait up to 3 months to discover that an employee’s visa had expired without their knowledge. Another feature that the team finds helpful is the ability to run a quick “point in time” check at any moment. This allows the team to be confident that the visa results they are sharing with other departments are accurate. Email notifications when someone’s visa status has changed have greatly assisted them because they receive real-time information instead of having to search for it. 

One specific feature of Check Work Rights that Epworth finds especially relevant to the Health Care industry is finding out if the employee in question is the primary or secondary visa holder. This is relevant because if doctors, for example, are 482 primary visa holders, they are still able to work for another hospital. This small piece of information is relevant and can decide whether or not the individual gets hired. 

Implementation: Check Work Rights CTO Aaron was involved in the implementation process to ensure that the software was running and integrated with the current systems in place. Epworth was impressed with the speed of the implementation and the whole product was implemented and running in a few weeks. 

Follow up: The feedback from the team has been really positive, indicating that it was user-friendly and has made the onboarding process on new employees more seamless. This is impressive when all of the hospital groups’ visa holding employees from facilities staff to doctors have been on-boarded into the system.