Recommendation 3

HM Government Acknowledged

Recommendation 1 and 2 have been grouped together for an overarching response to the committee. The government agrees with the committee that monitoring staff wellbeing is essential both to better understand the various factors that impact upon wellbeing and to take action to drive continuous improvement. We support the work that the NHS and social care employers do to understand and respond to the wellbeing concerns of their staff. In the social care sector, we are committed to working closely with stakeholders to understand better the lived experience of the care workforce. However, the structure of the adult social care sector differs substantially from the NHS, and social care organisations are not comparable to NHS Trusts. Many social care providers are small to medium sized enterprises without the sophisticated HR functions required to coordinate the NHS Staff Survey at a local level. Therefore, we do not consider a direct extension of the NHS Staff Survey to social care to be the most suitable measure. Instead, we are committed both to increasing engagement with the workforce and to working with employers, sector representatives and local government to explore options for national or local surveys with the sector. As part of this work we hope to strengthen our understanding of staff wellbeing, including the impact of the pandemic, and will work with the sector to support action based on that understanding. The NHS Staff survey is one of the largest workforce surveys in the world and has been conducted every year since 2003. All NHS Trusts (foundation trusts, acute and specialist hospital trusts, ambulance service trusts, mental health, community and learning disability trusts) are required to participate whilst Clinical Commissioning Groups, Commissioning Support Units and Social Enterprises may choose to undertake the NHS Staff Survey on a voluntary basis. During 2021 the NHS staff survey was piloted in primary care to help understand staff experience in a consistent and standardised way. At the outset of the pandemic, a monthly survey focused on health and wellbeing – the People Pulse – was introduced to support organisations in listening to their staff and informing plans. Building on this, and to provide a way to monitor employee experience more frequently, a Quarterly Pulse Survey was introduced in 2021, creating more opportunities for staff to provide feedback. In July 2020, NHS England and Improvement (NHSEI) published the NHS People Promise, alongside the NHS People Plan. The seven elements of the People Promise have come from those that work in the NHS and articulates the culture we want all staff to identify with by 2024. A key theme of the People Promise is to ensure staff are safe and healthy, with a culture of wellbeing a priority. In 2021, the NHS staff survey was redesigned to align with the NHS People Promise whilst maintaining longitudinal data for indices such as Engagement, Morale, Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) and Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES). Ensuring staff are ‘safe and healthy’ is a key element of the NHS People Promise and is a theme that allows the NHS staff survey to make an overall assessment of staff wellbeing. Whilst bringing the staff survey in line with the People Promise, previous themes were also updated with a stronger question set to enable greater robust measurement going forward. A new set of questions has been included in the staff survey under the theme of “We are safe and healthy” which specifically assesses burnout. Using the annual NHS Staff Survey as a way to measure progress on staff health and wellbeing will allow teams and departments, as well as whole organisations, to see their progress and take action to improve. To support action based on learning from the staff survey, the Wellbeing dashboard has been developed in the Model Health System, which is an online NHS analytics platform which includes benchmarking data for all NHS providers and systems. Model Hospital System is available to all NHS trusts and draws on NHS Staff Survey data as well as other key metrics such as staff retention rates and sickness absence data. The dashboard will help boards and Wellbeing Guardians (a board level or equivalent senior leadership role, designed to champion the wellbeing of their NHS organisational workforce) to make a more rounded assessment of staff health and wellbeing, learn from other peers and identify and make improvements over time.