Prioritising staff health and wellbeing is crucial to the performance of NHS Trusts and it is now being incentivised. So have lessons been learned from high profile reviews or are staff now becoming the ‘shock absorbers’ of a system under pressure? The Clinical Services Journal reports.
In 2009, an influential review of the health and wellbeing of NHS staff, known as ‘the Boorman report’,1 found that organisations that prioritised staff health and wellbeing performed better, with improved patient satisfaction, higher quality scores, better outcomes, greater levels of staff retention, and lower rates of sickness absence. However, feedback showed that many staff were “not convinced that their employer viewed their health and wellbeing as important” and the review called on NHS Trusts to “put staff health and wellbeing at the heart of their work.”
Recommendations included an identified board-level champion, senior managerial support, and training in health and wellbeing for healthcare leaders. The NHS Constitution, which followed, in January 2010, subsequently included a commitment to “provide support and opportunities for staff to maintain their health, wellbeing and safety”.
Despite the increased awareness around this issue, some Trusts unfortunately failed to deliver on this commitment. The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal provides a high-profile example of how care quality can be impacted when healthcare leaders do not have sufficient regard for staff welfare.
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