56053Quality-assured online selection for securing future health professionalsClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKHealth Service providers are under increasing pressure to secure a sustainable workforce during the COVID-19 crisis. But social distancing has prohibited personal contact and therefore traditional face-to-face interview methods for selection to job roles and training are no longer possible. The impact is potentially catastrophic for maintaining the workforce at 1.2 million NHS employees as well as for developing it through universities who interview over 100,000 applicants annually for medicine, nursing, midwifery and allied health professional education programmes. NHS employers and universities have used a face-to-face (F2F) interview method called multiple mini interviews (MMIs) for healthcare selection processes for the last 15 years. MMIs offer a robust approach designed to minimise bias and increase diversity such that they are endorsed by Health Education England. MMIs comprise a series of 6 to 12 stations each lasting 5 to 10-minutes with different interviewers, who have no prior knowledge of candidates, in a timed circuit. At each station, candidates answer scenarios based on real-life events that assess pre-defined attributes and values. MMIs are not currently feasible with the need to remove personal contact resulting in forced acceptance of, and over-night adaptation to, online technologies like videoconferencing. Absent online MMIs, various improvised approaches have been necessarily adopted to ensure the essential continuity of candidate selection for NHS service provision and healthcare student training. Sammi-Select are developing an automated version of MMIs in an existing Innovate UK project for leading enterprises. The proposed project would strengthen this activity, resulting in a brand new capability demonstrating key parts of the core Sammi-Select system integrated with online videoconferencing tools. The result will be a unique technology capable of addressing the current healthcare selection crisis. To ensure fitness for purpose, the Sammi-Select team will engage through its extensive networks and contacts across healthcare professions including UK Medical Schools Council, Royal College of Midwives, European Midwives Association, Council of Deans for Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals and Health Education England. Several test-bed sites are established across the UK and US are also committed to supporting Sammi-Select. The proposed project would significantly leverage, and provide additionality to, prior public investment in the existing project. Maintaining essential health service provision has never been more pressing, and the proposed technology would enable candidate selection for the long term in a robust and quality assured way. The extension for impact funding will support sustained recruitment to healthcare professions through accelerating and de-risking readiness of two videoconference plugins - for Zoom and Teams - to augment an extant online interview intelligence system. Scope and range of user testing will be extended across a multiplicity of test-bed sites that have already keenly engaged with the project. This will leverage likelihood of uptake thereby easing pressures in recruiting that continue to be keenly felt due to social distancing restrictions.