Improving the health and wellbeing of NHS staff

Published: 01 February 2012

Since the last Public Health Forum newsletter was published in August 2011, the Department of Health has launched two key documents focused on improving the health and wellbeing of NHS staff.

The documents aim to facilitate improvements for NHS staff through the development of local practice and service development.

They also illustrate how the re-alignment of occupational health services will provide a service that supports the health and wellbeing of staff in the widest sense.

NHS Health and Wellbeing Improvement Framework

The framework supports decision-makers on boards in establishing a culture that promotes staff health and wellbeing. It offers a structure for improvement that is needed in many organisations and across the regions.

It also sets out the scale of the current challenge, particularly the reductions in sickness absence rates that each region is aiming for, and gives detailed information on the range of health and wellbeing services that should be available for staff and how progress can be measured.

To help delivery, it signposts materials that will be useful across the organisation to help achieve health and wellbeing goals and which can be used by managers at all levels to help their staff attain high levels of health and wellbeing both within and outside work.

Finally, it advises that health and wellbeing services need to be developed through a formal commissioning process to give them the authority they need to succeed. Where services are properly commissioned and progress is continually monitored, the levels of success will be much higher. This will also benefit patients through improved delivery of high quality care.

Realigning occupational health services

Healthy Staff, Better Care for Patients: Realignment of Occupational Health Services to the NHS in England offers recommendations to help suppliers of occupational health services to health care staff play a key role in the delivery of safe, effective and efficient patient care through promoting and protecting the health of staff.
To achieve this, the document outlines how existing services need to be realigned to:

provide services to prevent staff becoming ill or injured at work
actively promote health and wellbeing in the workplace
maximise access to and retention of work through timely rehabilitation services.

Realignment of occupational health services is a key step towards achieving reductions in sickness absence and the £555 million productivity savings outlined in the NHS Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention programme by 2013.

To this end, proposals have been made in three key areas where work needs to be focused in the initial stages: