Positive National NHS Staff Survey Results For Community NHS Trust

Community-based NHS staff look forward to going to work, are motivated and engaged, according to the latest national NHS Staff Survey.

Compared to the national average for community trusts in 2014, Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust (LCHS) has ranked better than comparable community NHS trusts on 11 key findings and compares equally on a further 15 key findings out of 29 in total.

The NHS Staff Survey is recognised as an important way of ensuring that the views of staff working in the NHS inform local improvements and input into local and national assessments of quality, safety, and delivery of the NHS Constitution.

LCHS is the county’s largest provider of community healthcare, with specialist nurses, therapists and wider teams caring for thousands of patients in services supporting the whole family at home, in community hospitals, clinics, minor injuries units and walk in centre.

The survey found that LCHS staff felt patients are the trust’s top priority and they would recommend the trust as both a place to work and receive treatment.

It also found staff felt satisfied with the quality of work they provided and overall job satisfaction had improved.

Andrew Morgan, Chief Executive of LCHS, said: “I am really pleased to see such positive results in this year’s Staff Survey. We aspire to be an organisation that both clinical and non-clinical staff would choose to work for and one that staff would recommend the trust to provide care for their own families. There is no greater accolade.

“It is widely acknowledged that a motivated and engaged workforce links directly to improved care for patients. The results are not a huge surprise to us as we regularly ask our staff for their views.

“Our Time to Care initiative had already alerted us to some issues which quite rightly needed to be addressed since the last National Staff Survey. As a result, we have upgraded equipment so that staff can quickly and easily update patient notes whilst in the patient’s home and we have simplified record keeping allowing staff to spend less time at the computer and more time with patients.    

“I was particularly pleased to see that our staff feel happy to raise concerns and the importance of this has been reiterated recently by the Secretary of State’s Freedom to Speak Up programme.”

Maz Fosh, Director of Workforce and Transformation at LCHS, added: “We are pleased with the results and recognise there are areas where we need to continue our efforts. We will be analysing the results in great detail and addressing those areas where more work is needed, particularly around staff working additional hours. We take seriously the health and wellbeing of our staff and have already introduced a number or measures which have reflected positively in the results. There is more to do and we anticipate a much improved score in the 2015 survey results.”

The full Staff Survey results are available here.