NHS Staff Survey

The Social Partnership Forum believes that the NHS staff survey has an important part to play in the relationship that the NHS has with its employees.

survey form

Our priorities

We have identified our priorities around the NHS staff survey results for 2009/10. The priorities remain the same as for 2007/08:

1. work-related stress
2. violence (against staff by patients and families)
3. harassment, bullying and abuse
4. staff appraisals
5. staff engagement and job satisfaction.

We encourage the NHS to work in partnership to find solutions to address these issues at national, regional and local level.

Whilst acknowledging that each of these national priorities will not be priority issues for all regions or individual NHS organisations we do feel that regional and local employers and staff representatives have a role in working in partnership to:

identify their own and the national priorities most pertinent to them
work in partnership to address their staff survey results and communicate their results and resulting actions to staff
share learning both locally and nationally

Working to improve the staff survey

The SPF has worked this year to support improvements in the staff survey in three ways:

Influencing improvements to the survey and the way it is delivered through membership of the NHS Staff Survey Improvement Board.

SPF are represented on the NHS Staff Survey Improvement Board which is a group for Key Stakeholders to consider the current NHS Staff Survey process, outputs and uses and identify how these might be further developed to reap the maximum use and insight from the survey at local, regional and national levels.

Working to make the links between policies and initiatives which support our priorities.

The national SPF priorities support the NHS Constitution staff pledges as follows:

SPF Staff Survey Priority	NHS Constitution Pledge
Appraisal	Pledge 2: to provide all staff with personal development, access to appropriate training for their jobs and line management support to succeed.
Stress, bullying, harrassment and violence	Pledge 3: to provide support and opportunities for staff to maintain their health, well-being and safety.
Staff engagement	Pledge 4: to engage staff in decisions that affect them and the services they provide, individually through representative organisations and through local partnership working arrangements. All staff will be empowered to put forward ways to deliver better and safer services for patients and their families.

In addition to the implementation of the NHS Constitution the SPF 2008 staff survey priorities also support and link to a number of current NHS work streams including:

Boorman review - Health, work and well-being
KSF review and development professional regulation

When these reviews have reported the national SPF will be looking at the outcomes and considering how our staff survey priority work streams can support NHS organisations to implement the recommendations.

Seeking new examples of learning and practice to share with NHS organisations.

In 2007/08 we produced a report highlighting existing support and guidance nationally under the priorities we had identified.

Download a copy of the report.

This year we have built on the work through identifying practical examples of work happening in the NHS.

Using analysis of the 2008/09 staff survey results we identified NHS organisations who have made improvements in our priority areas and approached them to work with us to draw out the shared learning from their experiences.

Four case studies are now available:

Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals Foundation Trust, using the staff survey to tackle workplace stress.

Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, using the staff survey to improve staff satisfaction and staff engagement.

NHS Plymouth, using the staff survey to tackle harrassment and bullying.

Somerset Partnership NHS Trust, using the staff survey to improve the quality of appraisals

The organisations represented on the SPF also work individually to support the NHS to make improvements resulting from the staff survey.

We are aware that there are many examples of good practice already happening in the NHS and would welcome any intelligence you could share with us in this area, either from individual organisations delivering improvements or through your own work regionally.