NHS Staff Survey results 2023

Message from John Martin, Chief Executive and Clare Melbourne, Director for People Strategy and OD

The 2023 NHS National Staff Survey results have now been published. Thank you to everyone who took part – the annual survey is a great way for us to hear your collective feedback and understand your experience of working with us. The findings are also important in helping us to understand where we are getting things right and areas where action is needed to help improve your experiences at work.

The latest survey was open to a wider pool of colleagues than in previous years, including bank staff, and the final response rate was 55%, with 2,905 colleagues responding.  While the response rate for the Trust was lower than the 2022 survey, the number of colleagues who were eligible to complete the survey was larger.

As always, the survey findings are shared openly, both across the Trust and publicly, and we encourage everyone across the organisation to be curious about the results, to discuss them within your teams and consider where we can make a real difference in improving where we work for everyone.

We are disappointed the results were not more positive this year as we know a great deal of work continues across all areas to help make the Trust a great place to work, but we also accept the reality of working within a challenging NHS system and the impact this has on all of our colleagues. We also recognise that the survey was completed before the Trust had fully embedded its new five-year Strategy and therefore colleagues will not have seen the tangible, positive impact that we are now seeing nearly 12 months on. 

We have seen results worsen in relation to colleagues finding a work/life balance, work pressure and burnout. We know much of this will be attributed to the impact of handover delays. Working in partnership to help reduce handover delays wherever possible remains a top priority. We continue to work with health and care partners across the region to tackle this significant issue through innovations such as Care Co-ordination Hubs and greater focus on our hear and treat.

We also know that many of the results within the survey do relate to things within our control such as how we treat each other, and how we approach our working days. These are areas we can focus on improving and are reliant on us all playing our part. This is what we are aiming to achieve through continued delivery of the Trust Strategy, encouraging all colleagues to value their working relationships, understand the impact we can have when we work together as one team, constructively questioning traditional approaches and changing ways of working and encouraging all colleagues to live by, and demonstrate, our values and behaviours. 

We are committed to making the Trust a great place to work and plans for 2024/25 have been designed to improve what we do for our patients and colleagues. Just one example of this is the implementation of the Integrated County Leadership Model in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) – this has been designed to bring teams closer and to foster positive working relationships between team members and their leaders. We hope that this trial will improve the experience of work for colleagues across BNSSG, and set the framework on which to base the Trust’s team model for the future.

We are also continuing to work with Zeal Solutions in delivering our core leadership development programme, which has so far been offered to 550 of our leaders at all levels. We know from feedback given by those attending the sessions that this programme is really valuable. It focuses on building relationships with team members and actively creating culture through our actions and the way we do things. We are continuing to invest in this programme throughout 2024/25 as we know it is having a positive impact on our leaders and their teams in turn.

We also want to highlight two new questions added into this year’s survey, both relating to experiencing unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature. The Trust staff survey results show that 8.34% of people responding experienced unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature from other colleagues and 21.8% had experienced this type of behaviour from patients, their relatives or members of the public. This is a theme we are doing everything we can to support through our Sexual Safety Charter and ongoing campaign to protect your sexual safety at work. We have seen an unprecedented number of formal disciplinary cases due to sexual harassment in the last year, and we will continue to take action where concerns are raised as well as raising awareness and supporting conversations and learning around this topic.

The People Promise – benchmarking

In addition to the results above the NHS Staff Survey Coordination Centre has also themed the questions into different categories to align with the People Promise and then benchmarked SWASFT against the other ambulance trusts. 

The People Promise elements are:

• We are compassionate and inclusive
• We are recognised and rewarded
• We each have a voice that counts
• We are safe and healthy
• We are always learning
• We work flexibly
• We are a team
• Staff engagement

• Morale 

The results are within the Staff Survey reports but it was encouraging to see that against all nine People Promise themes SWASFT was middle of the pack in terms of scoring.

Please do take some time to have a look at the results.  We will continue to work with leaders across the organisation to review them and your collective feedback to help us understand your experience and drive change to improve this, and make SWASFT a great place to work.

Leaders within your specific directorates will be updating you on your local results and if you have any further feedback or suggestions please do feed them into your team conversations. If you would like to be involved in any part of making improvements please ask your line manager how you can get involved.