Little progress has been made on addressing NHS nurses’ health since a major report last year urged the organisation to become an “exemplar employer” on staff health and well-being.
This is the picture painted by a survey of 650 nurses, carried out by Nursing Times, which found that almost 80 per cent of respondents do not currently believe their trust gives employee health and well-being enough priority.
A report published in November last year by Dr Steve Boorman made 20 recommendations for the NHS to implement on staff health and well-being, including:
It also put forward a host of other expected measures that trusts should follow, including provision of healthy food, smoking cessation support, and promoting exercise.
However, progress on these recommendations is, so far, thin on the ground, according to the results of Nursing Times‘ survey, in which more than a third of respondents said their NHS employer did not provide healthy food options in staff restaurants. Many said they brought in snacks from home.
Three-quarters of respondents said they did not view their director of nursing as a good role model for a healthy lifestyle, and only 7 per cent said staff health and well-being were covered as part of the induction process for new employees.
NHS lead for the Association of Occupational Health Nurses, Kate Kyne, told Nursing Times that the NHS is making steady progress to improve in areas like back-care advice and healthier meals, but admitted that boards are still not giving staff health and well-being the priority it deserves.
Said Kyne: “It has been left to occupational health to really champion and take forward. Sometimes that is a real battle, especially when the board has so many other high priorities.”
She said occupational health services should be moved from sitting beneath human resources departments and be part of the director of nursing’s responsibility, so that nurses’ line managers could witness the value of improved staff well-being.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “The NHS operating framework for 2010-11 made staff health and well-being a priority but tasked each NHS organisation to set its own target and delivery plan. This work is in hand but plans and timescales have not yet been finalised.”
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
