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The 2013 NHS Staff Survey in England

Today the Coordination Centre (Picker Institute Europe) published the latest Official Statistics for the NHS Staff Survey on behalf of NHS England.

This is the eleventh annual national survey of NHS staff.

Broadly, the survey shows that staff experience of working in the NHS is steadily improving compared to a year ago.

The 2013 survey involved 265 NHS organisations in England. This is the first year where organisations have been able to survey a census of their staff to feed into the published results.  In previous surveys, census data has not been included in trust or national level reports. Of the NHS organisations participating, 95 opted to complete a survey census, inviting all members of staff to participate, and the remaining organisations opted to complete the standard survey sampling method, where a selection of 850 staff were invited.  As a result, a total of 416,313 NHS staff invites were issued. This represents twice the scale of the previous survey.

A total of 203,028 responses were received from NHS staff, forming a response rate of 49%.

The data included in this publication was collected between late September and early December 2013.

The type and number of NHS organisations participating in the 2013 NHS Staff Survey are:

  •         141 Acute trusts
  •         57 Mental health and learning disability trusts 
  •         20 Community trusts
  •         19 Acute specialist trusts 
  •         15 CCGs
  •         11 Ambulance trusts
  •         1 CSUs
  •         1 Social enterprise

Key Findings

There are 34 questions in the staff survey. The results are used to form scores for 28 Key Findings, which when viewed together to report against specific pledges in the NHS Constitution, give more information about specific areas of interest.

Broadly, staff experience of working in the NHS is showing a steady improvement, compared to previous years.

The national level results for the 2013 NHS Staff Survey Key Findings and the overall staff engagement score are:

2013 NHS Staff Survey – Key Findings for England

Of the 28 Key Findings including the overall staff engagement score, 21 have shown a positive improvement, 4 have stayed the same and 4 have shown a small negative change.

Further information

Further information outlining the survey’s methodology and how scores are calculated is published on the NHS Staff Survey website. Here you can also access more detailed results including data for individual organisations:

2013 NHS Staff Survey publication 

You can also access NHS England’s press office news post by going to:

2013 NHS Staff Survey news post