Staff experience at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust continues to improve year on year, according to the results of the 2018 annual NHS National Staff Survey, which was published yesterday.
Morale and engagement with colleagues were just two of the highlights shown in the annual check of colleague experience.
There were also big improvements in a number of areas, when compared to the previous year’s results, including:
- Colleagues feeling satisfied with the extent the organisation values their work
- Colleagues with a disability feeling the organisation made reasonable adjustments to enable them to carry out their work
- Colleagues feeling satisfied with recognition for good work
- Colleagues feeling communication between senior management and staff is effective
Of the 10 themed areas of the survey, the Trust scored above average in 7 including:
- Employee health and wellbeing
- Immediate Managers
- Morale
- Quality of Appraisals
- Safety Culture
- Staff Engagement
David Wilkinson, Director of People and Organisational Development, UHMBT, said: “We are delighted to see further improvements in the results again this year in a number of categories. I was particularly pleased that the results for morale and engagement demonstrated the progress we have made in establishing the Trust as a Great Place to Work.
“This builds on the recognition we received in the Personnel Today awards last year where we were won the overall award’, as well as the Employee Engagement Award.
“I’m also really pleased to see an improvement in the experience of colleagues with a disability – which is a tribute to the impact of the work led by our Staff Disability Network and Health and Wellbeing Team.
“There is still much to do around ensuring colleagues experience a consistently good experience across all areas – and particularly in the way that colleagues interact with each other. But I’d like to thank all staff for completing the survey – it the largest response we’ve ever received!
“We now have the opportunity to further strengthen the work we’ve undertaken as we work on the Colleague Experience Strategy, which will engage with colleagues to ensure they have the opportunity to contribute.”
David continued: “There is still more we can do and we already have a number of initiatives to support those areas of the staff experience which require the most urgent attention, including collaborative working with our trade union and inclusion network colleagues to understand and address bullying and harassment by creating positive working environments and ways of working, but taking robust action where behaviours are sub-optimal at team or individual level.
“This work is being led by the Chief Executive and we want the additional attention we are giving this issue to be seen in future staff survey results.”
The Trust is running a comprehensive feedback programme to share the results and gather staff ideas and views on how best to both prioritise, and then respond to the survey findings. The feedback programme is scheduled to run through March and conversations with staff will be collated into an overarching action plan in April. This will then provide a structured approach for the organisation to initiate any changes or actions so that we can deliver improvements for staff in the coming months.
The NHS National Survey is carried out in every NHS Trust in the country and collects the views of a number of randomly selected staff about working in their NHS organisation. Data is used to improve local working conditions for staff, and ultimately to improve patient care. All responses are completely confidential to encourage staff to be completely open and honest in their answers.
The full UHMBT report can be viewed on the NHS Staff Survey website at: http://www.nhsstaffsurveys.com/Page/1056/Home/NHS-Staff-Survey-2018/