NHS Staff survey results
Staff at UHDB continue to say that the Trust is the place where they would like their families to receive treatment. Each year, the NHS nationally undertakes an anonymous staff survey, with the survey this year being conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite this more than 6,800 staff took part, the highest number since the Trust was created.
More than 80% of said they agreed with the key question of “if a friend or relative needed treatment, I would be happy with the standard of care provided by this organisation”, which is well above the national average of 74.3%.
In addition, staff also said that they believed UHDB is the best place to work and that the care of patients was the organisation’s top priority. Both areas scored well above the national average. For ‘Care of patients / service users is my organisation's top priority’ we scored 81.6% against the national average of 79.4%. For ‘I would recommend my organisation as a place to work’ we scored 71.1% against the national average of 66.9%.
On the ten main themes in the survey, which include topics like equality, diversity & inclusion and staff engagement, the Trust scored level with or within 1-2% of the national average across all ten scores.
Gavin Boyle, Chief Executive, said: “I think the most important measure of any care provider is whether the staff that work there would want their friends and family to be treated there too and that is certainly the case at our hospitals. Overall we’re pleased with the response. Our staff have been through a huge amount of change, first with the merger and then the pandemic coming closely after this. What it has done is bring our people together and I think this can be seen in the survey results.”
One area of concern is the increase is staff personally experiencing physical violence at work from patients and service users, their relatives or other members of the public. The national average has stayed the same but over the last two years has increased at UHDB. Nearly one in five of our respondents and experienced this. This is especially so for colleagues from minority groups.
Gavin added: “We have historically called on violence against NHS staff to stop and more recently launched our No Place for Racism campaign. But nearly 1,200 of my colleagues are reporting that they have personally experienced physical violence at work from patients, their relatives or other members of the public and more reporting harassment. Again, I’m calling on the small section of our communities who are responsible to stop this and treat all NHS staff with the respect they deserve.”