NHS Plymouth

This case study looks at how NHS Plymouth are using the NHS staff survey to tackle harrassment and bullying.

About NHS Plymouth

Plymouth Sound

NHS Plymouth is the lead NHS organisation in Plymouth responsible for improving the health and well-being of the local population. It provides and purchases, or commissions health services, including mental health and learning disabilities services for more than 250,000 people who live in the City of Plymouth.

NHS Plymouth employs over 2,800 staff. As an organisation it is committed to fairness, equality and we value diversity. They recognise that people face discrimination, harassment, bullying and prejudice as part of their everyday life. Therefore, they continually strive to create fully inclusive and accessible services and aim to build a workforce that is representative of the community it serves.

NHS Plymouth has NHS Employer Positively Diverse Lead Site status and is also a Department of Health 2nd Wave Pacesetter site.

What Plymouth did and why

How they did it

Partnership working

Results and next steps

Contact details

What Plymouth did and why

In 2005 Plymouth Teaching PCT (now known as NHS Plymouth) commissioned the School of Psychology at Exeter University to undertake a stress survey of its workforce under its health and well-being programme. It became apparent from this research that some of their employees felt stressed at work due to bullying and harassment. This behaviour came not just from patients, carers and other visitors but from co-workers.

Alongside this initiative they had been monitoring the results of their own internal staff survey. This showed levels of dissatisfaction from staff due to being the target of harassment and bullying, they started to do work with the Andrea Adams Trust National Bullying Helpline to develop a team of harassment and bullying staff advisors. The intension of this was to give staff a mechanism where they could discuss a problem with an advisor and get appropriate support. We recruited six volunteer advisors all trained by the Andrea Adams Trust.

There were cost implications for both the stress survey and in the development of the harassment and bullying advisor team but this was seen by the executive team as being money well spent if it brought about a more dignified workplace. It is well documented by current research that the targets of harassment and/or bullying can suffer a range of detriments e.g. loss of physical and mental health; loss of productivity; poor morale etc., and that management intervention is one recognised way of reducing or eliminating the effects of such behaviour.

How they did it

From 2005 onwards and in addition to the two key action points above NHS Plymouth developed the following initiatives:

resourced an employee assistants programme for all staff and their immediate families
enhanced our occupational health services through a new self-referral system
enhanced occupational health services to include access to a suitably qualified nurse with mental health experience
resourced a supporting working lives group to 2009 to look at health and wellbeing issues
introduced external mediation and used where appropriate
piloted the health at work initiative across three directorates so that we could benchmark ourselves
closely monitored the annual NHS staff survey and developed an annual staff survey action plan
developed other staff survey reports to feed into our Diversity Inclusion Network, Disability Working Group, Religion and Belief Group and LGB&T Working Group
used the data from the staff survey to feed into other training courses like appraisal; conflict resolution etc.
developed a new Dignity at work policy and Whistleblowing policy
increased training for staff on the Dignity at work policy from the beginning of 2008 (1,400 staff have attended a one hour awareness session)
added a one day Dignity at work training course to the core management training programme from the beginning of 2008
held training days for complaints investigators
closely scrutinised incident reports
developed a ‘you told us’ and ‘we acted’ flyer to staff to communicate what we had done
generally communicated our actions using posters, staff magazine, staff training and ‘Dear colleague’ letters and using anti harassment toilet door signs as much as possible
at directorate level discussed staff satisfaction levels as reported in the staff survey
involved partner organisations in the discussion, for example, Plymouth & District Race Equality Council.

Partnership Working

Key to the delivery of our work to reduce harassment and bullying in the workplace has been the input from our Trade Union Representatives who have been equal partners in developing our action plans. There is a strong case for staff involvement and evidence shows that working in partnership in the workplace is mutually beneficial not just in the context of ‘our staff’ but in the context of ‘union members’ leading to improved working lives.

Trade Union Representatives were in from the beginning and gave a commitment very early on to work with us to formulate an action plan that would help us to reduce the instances of bullying and harassment. This included their attendance at meetings; sitting on tendering committees; doing presentations at our JCCN; undertaking training in managing dignity at work issues. One representative also undertook specialist training to become a specialist advisor on bullying and harassment and co-facilitated and tutored on NHS Plymouth’s Harassment and Bullying Core Management Training Programme.

Working with our accredited representatives on the staff survey to formulate and implement our action plans has been about effective partnership working, good communication and above all, real team-work.

NHS Plymouth believe that the numerous measures reported above coupled with swift and effective management action (at least one case of racial harassment has lead to the perpetrator being dismissed) is sending a very powerful message to staff that where harassment takes place we will not condone it but will deal with it robustly and fairly.

Sue Behenna, Workforce Development Manager, NHS Plymouth believes that to deliver sustainable improvements, staff involvement and partnership working is crucial.

Results and Next Steps

All that said it is clear from the most recent staff survey (2008) that whilst incidence of staff on staff harassment and bullying is reducing year on year the incidents of violence between co-workers has increased up from 0% to 2% in 12 months. Whilst 2% is average for a primary care trust with mental health and learning disability services one case of physical violence is not acceptable and one case too many and so their staff survey action plans for this year include a key target of zero tolerance to violence. The staff survey should be seen as a never ending cycle and NHS Plymouth has learned that in order to tackle harassment, bullying and violence requires a number of interventions and not just one.