NHS Trusts are losing millions of pounds to staff sick days, unnecessarily. That’s the message from healthcare leaders at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Trust, University Hospitals of Liverpool Group and analytics firm Strasys, who have joined forces to urge health boards across the country to review their workforce management practices.
The NHS has seen a rise in staff sickness in recent years, with the latest data showing more than 2 million full-time equivalent days lost in June alone. Anxiety, stress and depression are among the most reported reasons, accounting for 26.6% percent of these absences.1 In a climate where health services are under pressure, and waiting times are at an estimated 7.6 million,2 it is clear that "care providers can no longer afford to be passive and must do more to learn about and understand their staff", the healthcare leaders claim.
Speaking recently at a Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) webinar, Naeem Younis, CEO of Strasys, was joined by Melissa Swindell, Chief People Officer at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and Heather Barnett, Chief People Officer at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Both Trusts are now using data analytics and AI modelling to develop targeted interventions and strategies to break worrying sickness and productivity trends in the sector. They are urging other Trusts to do the same.
The Alder Hey Shift
A new approach to working with staff at Alder Hey has led to an astounding 1% reduction in sickness rates, a 5% improvement in retention within the year and a further £70 million in financial savings.
Against a backdrop of unsustainable pressure, burnout and high staff churn (1 in 3 employees were on the move at anyone one time) leading to a decline in productivity at higher costs, Alder Hey was in a difficult position. It experienced huge growth in demand and the pandemic highlighted the internal challenges that existed in the organisation, with a 23,000 person waiting list growing by 4% month on month. It was critical to instigate a journey of data-led workforce planning to address the immediate challenges whilst bringing in new ways of working.
Melissa explains how a new approach to data analytics provided clarity: “We knew if we didn't get things right with our workforce, we weren't going to get things right for our service users.
“Working with Strasys, we connected the dots between all of the information that we had from our workforce data, our activity data, our finance data and our staff survey, bringing it together to analyse it in a very different way.”
By recognising that staff had different needs and ambitions not limited to their job title, the data shaped the Alder Hey workforce into five segments, enabling bespoke strategies to be developed.
Melissa explains one interesting group were the ‘stayers’, who had been at the organisation for more than eight years, but were disconnected: “We've got lots of people in Alder Hey who worked here a very long time. That is amazing, because we've got organisational history, tons of commitment, tons of knowledge. But on the flip side, what we saw was there are some downsides …they didn’t feel particularly aligned with the vision of the organisation. The turnover was really low, but the sickness was high.”
Strasys and the Trust were able to use these findings to understand their workforce, for example, some long-term staff feeling underappreciated, some with typically age related health issues (such as menopause) or others experiencing difficult life challenges. Armed with this knowledge, the Trust was able to design targeted interventions and to encourage the board to fund new initiatives for staff - retention at Alder Hey now approximately stands at an astounding 10%.
Lessons from Liverpool
University Hospitals of Liverpool Group is a complex organisation with 15,000 staff spread across four sites. With a £1.2billion turnover, their ambition was to take the learnings from Alder Hey to care for and retain their staff, increase productivity and ultimately make huge recurrence savings.
They too partnered with Strasys, taking on a huge transformation project to battle complex needs. Through segmenting their workforce and identifying key patterns and revelations, they have recently launched a strategy which in its infancy is already proving effective in terms of staff retention.
Heather said: “We've tried the traditional approach to building people strategies. We followed policy, we focused on regulatory compliance. We operated within our financial envelope. But the result was our workforce plans weren’t true workforce plans. They mirrored the financial plan, and we submitted that, hopeful we had the right things in place.
“We needed to start from the bottom up… If you really understand your workforce, and you understand their needs, their wants, their behaviours, and the demands of their work, you can start building strategies in a different way, and we really need to start talking about this as a community of HR, OD, people professionals.”
In the past decade, Strasys has worked with the NHS and with health systems globally on vast transformation projects. Their work has a reach impacting the lives of more than 50 million people, but according to Naeem, the lesson remains the same - understand your workforce more deeply: “The NHS is a people to people business.” he explains, “In order to do effective people planning, we have to really think about planning from a nonlinear approach to a connected approach.
“The question all NHS leaders should be asking in terms of workforce planning and management is, with limited resources, where do we actually make the biggest impact.
“The data is there. It's about having the capability and the headroom to ask the right questions. And once you do that, you have this richness of actionable insights, putting the human stories behind the staff numbers, and designing very specific interventions, which can make a real, profound impact. And those are the impacts and initiatives we need in order to address the massive challenges we are facing within the NHS.”
References
1. NHS Sickness Absence Rates, NHS England Digital
2. Statistics, Consultant-led Referral to Treatment Waiting Times Data 2024-25
