NHS healthcare workers’ health and wellbeing
Learning about the needs and wishes of healthcare workers within the NHS in order to be able to better address their health and wellbeing requirements
After the 2009 Boorman report (NHS Health and Well-being), sharp focus was brought on the (then) current state of the health of NHS healthcare workers and staff. The health of these workers is vital to efficiency and resilience of UK health services and to optimal patient care, and we investigated to further understand this issue from the perspective of NHS workers themselves.
Aims
We know there is a need to find ways to help healthcare workers lead healthier lives.
The main aim of this study was to find out how healthcare workers themselves feel about this issue, and what would they like to be done.
What did this study involve?
This study consisted of a series of focus groups carried out with NHS healthcare workers and staff. Overall we conducted 80 focus groups as part of this study, and spoke to over 450 staff members at a large NHS hospital.
What has the study found so far?
We have analysed transcripts of the focus group sessions, and a number of key themes emerged.
Many staff knew little about existing initiatives available for them to take up to maximise their health and wellbeing, highlighting the difficulty of ensuring effective communication of the availability of these services to all staff members, in a way that reaches everyone with equity in a large organisation with over 11,000 staff members, working 24 hours day 7 days per week.
There was some distrust of the motivations of NHS employers for making such measures available and it was perceived that this was not necessarily because they cared about the staff, but were viewed as more of a ‘tick box’ exercise, or were being introduced to bring in increased income for the trust.
Staff pointed to under-staffing as the single biggest factor affecting their own health and wellbeing, and wanted better staffing to enable them to take rostered breaks and avoid unpaid overtime.
This research was conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, and while this may have introduced new priorities in response to the pressures it has created on the NHS it is also likely to have exacerbated the factors driving this research
Publications
Papers
We have written a paper on this research which has now been accepted by BMC Health Services Research. This article has not been published yet, but a link will appear here once it has.
Centre institutions
Further information
For any queries related to this work, please contact kwb@mrc.soton.ac.uk