The Bi-annual conference for NHS Employee Wellbeing
Sophie Chester-Glyn • 7 October 2019
In September we attended the Westminster Insight
bi-annual conference for NHS Employee
Well-being to hear from trailblazing front line professionals including, NHS leaders, the Royal College of Nursing, Skills for Health and Health Education England on how to improve mental health and well-being provisions for your employees. In our quest to open up the care debate, read our summary of the conference here.
The event was chaired by Sir John Burn
(Chair of Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and non-executive director of NHS England). The first talk, by Simon Gregory, reminded us of the Tea and Empathy Facebook page
which provides informal peer support for NHS staff and describes itself as a national, informal, peer-to-peer support network aiming to foster a compassionate and supportive atmosphere throughout the NHS. He also highlighted that whilst people in the NHS often focus on supporting others, it is often their own staffs’ personal comfort which suffers as a result with around 38% of staff missing a meal break during their working week and mainly clerical staff suffering in terms of well-being.
In line with a key recommendation made in the Health Education England’s (HEE) NHS Staff and Learners’ Mental Wellbeing Commission report, there has been increasing pressure
to introduce well-being guardians into the NHS for NHS staff. A well-being guardian would be a dedicated person, trained to recognise and support staff when they are experiencing difficulties. NHS Improvement and HEE are looking at taking this forward with a group led by Dr. Paul Litchfield.
Professor Pauline Walsh, Pro Vice Chancellor (Health and Wellbeing) and Executive Dean, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Keele Univeristy and, Chair of Education Forum Royal College of Nursing.
Pauline focused her talk on the well-being of medical students. She highlighted that students are ill equipped for the clinical placements and heavy workload which face them after medical school. She also pointed to the social isolation in education.
In terms of student health, the Pauline pointed out that the Universities UK (UUK) Step Change Programme
led by professor Steven West
at the University of the West of England (UWE) considers mental health in terms of a whole university approach such as the individual support provided to students and community support. She also suggests that institutions should:
- See students as individuals not just data.
- Realise that managing transitions from university to the NHS are vital and that this is best achieved through a partnership approach with students and university and clinician placements.
- Recognise the need to accept difference and diversity.
Pauline also elaborated on what they are doing at Keele University which include to support health student’s mental health. This included:
- NHS staff and learners mental wellbeing support
- HEE RePAIR Programme. RePAIR stands for Reducing Attrition and Improving Retention project. It has enabled Health Education England (HEE) to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors impacting on healthcare student attrition and the retention of the newly qualified workforce in the early stages of their careers.
- Supporting UUK Stepchange
Lynn Demeda, Director of Workforce Programmes
The morning session concluded with an interesting case study talk from Lynn Demeda, Director of Workforce Programmes, Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust. Lynn was passionate about concentrating on changing workers' experiences, spurred on by the fact that only 55% of staff surveyed were happy with the flexible working arrangements available, which she felt was not good enough.
Lynn surmised that, whilst we care for our patients, we need to support our staff in the same way and that there needs to be person centredness in this approach as ‘one size does not fit all’. For her, the biggest thing that helped improve organisational culture in NHS, is a human conversation and feeling comfortable about talking.
Some of the things they’re doing in her hospital includes improvements to people practices such as:
- Focusing on values and behaviours.
- Human conversations rather than formal processes, senior managers being given time to have coffee with their staff
- There should be a deeper focus on staff data/feedback/survey and complaints.
- People coming together to solve issues, such as talking about bullying and speaking truth to power and making senior leaders see things from a different perspective (this sounds a lot like coproduction to us!).
A recurring theme was allowing people to take a break, supporting work life balance and her summary was that people working in health should be curious about data and understand what staff think. They should also recognise that small things can be an impact such as overnight food for doctors, review of the ‘good work standards’ and digital well-being initiatives.
The afternoon session started with a panel which included Dr Benedict Eccles
from Skills for Health, Professor Wendy Reid
(Director for Education and Quality Health Education England) and Professor Dinesh Bhugra CBE
(president of the BMA council).
Dr Benedict Eccles from skills for health felt that NHS Employee well-being was an ongoing issue which felt a bit like déjà vu or what he termed to be a ‘festival of words’ whereby the issue of well-being and mental health of staff had been something which, having been identified several decades ago, has yet to be solved, but continues to be discussed.
Professor Wendy Reid mused that the NHS should have a personalised training programme as a right for staff. Whilst not directly linked to well-being, a question from the audience about admission into the profession being strict and contributing to staffing issues prompted Wendy to reveal some potential changes afoot. She pointed out that currently 27% schools do not teach chemistry and there is growing support to open up psychology to the admissions criteria so that it is seen on a par with chemistry, which could have a significant impact to student numbers. At the moment, school leavers need (in the previous GCSE grading) 3 A's and an A* in chemistry. This could all change.
Professor Dinesh spoke of some alarming statistics from an international survey including 12 countries, regarding the mental health and well-being for trainees and qualified medics. It found that 88% of respondents felt that they had suffered burn-out. Other findings included that a lot of the issues were structural, there had been a mechanisation of medicine and that for him, we ought to revisit ‘medicine’s social contract’. He discusses the idea of medicine’s social contract in more detail here.
Comment below in anything you found interesting in this conference summary and as usual feel free to share.
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