Promoting positive staff health and wellbeing
Introduction
The health and wellbeing of our staff is always of paramount importance to us. This has never been more crucial than it is during the current pandemic.
In keeping with, and in addition to, national guidance set out in DL (2020)8 - Staff Wellbeing and Support: Employers’ Duty Of Care During COVID-19 Pandemic (The Scottish Government, 2020), we adopted a wide variety of measures to help promote positive staff health (both physical and mental) and wellbeing. These included:
Gauging the impact
To check whether these measures were in fact having a beneficial effect on staff health and wellbeing, we then devised a service evaluation strategy. The aims of this were to:
To gather this information two staff survey questionnaires were devised to be delivered over two separate time points. Results from the first of these surveys are outlined below.
Results from initial survey
Not only did 227/683 (33%) of our staff complete this first survey, but the spread of responses gained from across all disciplines also suggested that we manage to achieve a good representative sample of our entire staffing population.
From the provisional analysis of these results, we found that the levels of staff health and wellbeing reported at this time point were much in keeping with pre-Covid-19 levels in our staff group. We also know from previous research undertaken in our hospital, that how safe staff feel is linked to their wellbeing. It was therefore good to note that, again, from this first survey, we found that the majority of participants (66%) reported feeling safe at work. The majority of staff (ranging from 71% - 87%) also reported that they found all the current national and local measures adopted to promote their health and wellbeing during the pandemic to be useful and effective, and many asked for initiatives like our local Staff Wellbeing Zone to continue to be available going forward.
Next steps
The second survey questionnaire, which constitutes the final part of our service evaluation will be completed over Winter 2020, when some of the longer-term effects of the pandemic may be beginning to be felt. Results from this second survey will also be reported once this is completed. This second set of results will then be contrasted with the results from the first survey and used to help inform our continued approach to promoting positive staff and wellbeing in the longer-term.