Investing in the health and wellbeing of the NHS workforce – our most valuable asset – is both morally and operationally essential. According to the latest data from the NHS Digital NHS Sickness Absence Rates report, the overall NHS sickness absence rate for England in April 2024 was 4.8%. The report states that ‘anxiety/stress/depression/other psychiatric illnesses’ was the most reported reason for sickness, accounting for over 542,600 full time equivalent days lost in that month alone. Combined with the recruitment and retention challenges facing the NHS, developing an integrated approach to supporting health and wellbeing is vital, particularly as we head towards winter pressures.
Prioritising staff health and wellbeing requires more than a series of initiatives, however. It needs to be embedded in your organisation’s culture, through your systems, processes and, most importantly, your leadership. In developing our own approach to health and wellbeing at NHS Arden & GEM, and in supporting other organisations to do the same, we have identified six steps that guide a strong health and wellbeing strategy.
1. Understand your workforce needs
The needs of a largely frontline, clinical workforce will differ from those who are desk-based or working from home. Understanding your workforce needs is essential. Use different methods to capture this data, including surveys and focus groups to gain quantitative and qualitative information which will show the type and scale of needs as well as more detailed insights about how these can be met. Make the most of existing data such as exit interview information, retention and sickness data to inform your thinking. Be curious about what your data is telling you.
2. Provide a range of health and wellbeing tools and resources to empower staff
Based on the needs identified in step one, develop tools and resources that will enable staff to take individual responsibility for their own wellbeing. This could include, for example:
- short video guides and self-assessments to ensure their home working set up supports good posture
- apps which encourage movement breaks or breathing exercises
- financial tips and resources
- events and training linked to specific conditions or challenges
- a wellbeing back to basics guide.
In developing your resources, consider the full range of wellbeing needs including emotional, physical, psychological, social, financial and career. Reach out to your employee assistance programme provider and engage them to support you with awareness campaigns. Many providers offer a broad range of resources and services which can provide practical information and support in areas such as health and lifestyle, work life, home life, finances, legal information, and access to counselling and emotional support.
3. Support managers and leaders to adopt a culture of wellbeing
Leaders and managers set the tone for what staff feel able or encouraged to do. They need to buy into why health and wellbeing is important. The NHS People Plan and People Promise support this. It is vital that we nurture the wellbeing of our NHS workforce, enabling them to be at their best for themselves and for patient care. Understanding the impact of poor health and wellbeing on both the individual and the organisation.
This is partly about leading by example – managers that tell their team members it’s fine to leave on time but stay late or send emails out of hours risk giving mixed messages. We must also consider different shift patterns here and be clear that team members are not expected to respond outside of their own working hours. Using scheduling tools to send emails and updates within normal working hours can help.
Provide training for managers in different formats to help them understand the value of investing and supporting their team’s health and support them in how to have wellbeing conversations. Encourage managers to discuss wellbeing in their regular one to one meetings and make the first question in an appraisal linked to wellbeing. These actions champion open and honest conversations and help in identifying potential causes of stress so we can put preventative action into place to reduce burnout.
4. Identify individuals and channels to champion health and wellbeing
Embedding a culture of health and wellbeing cannot fall to just one or two people. You need a group of enthusiastic individuals who can champion health and wellbeing across your organisation. In our experience, a combination of dedicated health and wellbeing champions and mental health first aiders (MHFAiders) provides a good mix of informed staff that can directly support staff and drive health and wellbeing initiatives. Be clear about what is involved and support your champions and MHFAiders with suitable training and ongoing peer support.
Think about the channels available to you to promote initiatives, tools and messages, recognising that different people interact and absorb information in many different ways. A mixture of newsletters, intranet information, events, toolkits and employee resource groups can help maintain a constant thread of health and wellbeing, reminding staff of the importance of managing their own health and the tools available. Make the information relatable by sharing stories and staff blogs and linking them to useful resources.
5. Enable and encourage take-up
Providing health and wellbeing resources is one thing – enabling staff to access them is another. Health and wellbeing initiatives need to be accessible. This is partly about managers giving staff the time to attend events and training, but it’s also about the type of guidance given and the ways resources are structured.
Provide training and events at different times and on different days to suit various work patterns and priorities. Where possible, offer bitesize e-learning modules that can be completed quickly, on demand.
6. Measure, evaluate, review
Drawing on the methods from step one, build in a regular review cycle to assess whether your approach is working and which initiatives are having the most impact. Conduct a general review annually and assess specific initiatives on completion. Include some free text options in surveys as that’s where the richest data can be found to help to continuously improve your approach. Share the findings with leaders and staff to demonstrate your ongoing commitment to listening and responding to workforce needs.
Implementing these steps can help your organisation improve health and wellbeing in a sustained way, and ensure staff feel empowered to take responsibility for their own health using the resources and support available to them. With winter pressures on the horizon, it’s even more important to embed healthy working habits and practices now. Consider how you could provide staggered breaks in quiet areas away from the hubbub of the ward or office. Use the ‘busy’ or ‘do not disturb’ functions on devices to create short moments of calm and schedule opportunities to access health and wellbeing resources. While this may feel impossible when your ‘to do’ or ‘to see’ list is long, we must ask ourselves about the cost of not doing this. If we don’t charge our phone battery, it won’t work, but a short burst of power can keep it functioning for the rest of the day. What if we all made the same commitment to ourselves – how might our performance improve? Check in with yourself regularly and ask yourself, how am I feeling, what do I need and how can I address this? Incorporating small changes into our daily lives can have a big impact on how we feel.
NHS Arden & GEM has become the third organisation in the UK to achieve ‘We invest in wellbeing’ Platinum accreditation following an assessment by Investors in People, and the first NHS organisation to receive this award.
