Staff wellbeing in the NHS

The Health Foundation’s report Fit for Purpose? Workforce Policy in the NHS reviewed the growing body of evidence from customer-facing industries showing that engaged and well-motivated staff are central to consumer satisfaction. Evidence from the NHS has also shown that staff engagement is closely linked to safety, effectiveness and patient experience. Good staff management can also offer significant financial savings for the NHS.

With continued pay restraint, recruitment and retention of NHS staff through financial incentives alone will be more challenging. For the foreseeable future the NHS will also need to compete for staff on non-financial aspects relating to the working environment. To recruit, retain and engage people, the NHS needs to make them feel much more valued and supported than they do at present, while at the same time engaging them with an unprecedented period of change.

The primary research question is: Based on the evidence, what is the business case for investing time, money and other resources in staff well-being and engagement exercises?

The objective of this work is to explore different types of evidence that can build the ‘hard’ business case for the ‘soft’ issues of staff engagement, support for intrinsic motivation and wellbeing.

The research undertaken jointly by the Work Foundation, Point of Care Foundation and RAND Europe, will include a review of existing literature, analysis of quantitative data sets, expert interviews, and key topic case studies. The work will produce a long and short list of potential actions and interventions that can increase staff wellbeing and engagement in ways that can improve NHS quality and performance.

Contact details

For further details about the project, please email Karen Steadman at The Work Foundation.