Employing people with criminal convctions

A note for applicants

As a Care Home, Nightingale is required by law to ensure that it only recruits and selects those people who are considered “suitable” for employment with vulnerable adults, in our case older people.

You are required on the job application form to make sure that you declare all convictions and cautions that you have, including “spent” convictions that you are not required to declare for other employment, because we are a Care Home.

In addition and by law we require each and every successful applicant to complete a Criminal Records Bureau Disclosure Declaration Form and once completed, we send this to the Criminal Records Bureau who will then report back to us on whether or not you have convictions and if you have, the number and nature of those convictions.

Nightingale reserves the right that from time to time during your employment, a further police check (CRB) may be required, and your refusal to co-operate would be viewed as a breach of your contract.

Your name will also be checked against the POVA (Protection Of Vulnerable Adults) register to ensure that you have not previously been either dismissed or subject to investigation regarding any POVA related incidents.

We commit ourselves to not unjustifiably discriminating against applicants with a conviction(s) and will not automatically bar applicants because they do have a conviction(s), although we will not appoint any person who has a conviction(s) that make them “unsuitable” for work with vulnerable people, in accordance with our legal duty.

The process that we follow in assessing whether someone with a conviction(s) is suitable is that we look at:

The relevance of the conviction(s) revealed to the post applied for
The seriousness of any offence(s)
The length of time since the offence(s)
Whether the applicant has a pattern of offending behaviour
Whether the applicant’s circumstances have changed since the offending behaviour
The circumstances surrounding the offence(s)
The risk to Nightingale and our services users

As an applicant, you need to be aware that if you do have a conviction(s) and do not either disclose the conviction(s) or provide us with full information about the nature or extent of the conviction(s), you face dismissal from any post you are appointed to subject to clearance from the Criminal Records Bureau.