DBS background checks mean NHS staff 'paying to work'

In March 2019 we reported that thousands of NHS jobs were requiring workers to pay for the costs of criminal background checks.

Get the data

We used data scraped from the NHS jobs website. The latest file was over 200MB and too large to share here. However, you can see the code used in the scraper below

Quotes and interviews

• Kerri Watt, hotel marketing manager who was asked to pay the costs of her own criminal background check
• A community psychiatric nurse from Yorkshire, who preferred to remain anonymous
• Karolina Gerlich, chief executive, the National Association of Care and Support Workers (Nacas)
• Spokeswoman, GMB trade union
• Spokesman, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
• Spokeswoman, York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
• Spokesman, North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust
• Jagriti Patwari, director of Eurocom CI, a company that carries out background checks
• Spokeswoman, NHS Employers

Visualisation

• Table: NHS jobs advertised with deductions from salaries for DBS checks, by employer (January-March 2019)

Code

• Python scraper
• RMarkdown notebook which queries the scraper