The Trust

Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust

The background

In 2012, the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust recognised team, inter-team working and employee satisfaction as critical to provide high quality, efficient services. The organisation adopted four pillars of employee engagement to make this happen:

• strong strategic narrative
• organisational integrity
• engaging managers
• employee voice

The approach

Using staff survey results as a guide the chief executive officer and board held listening events on an annual basis to understand what is important to employees. Learnings from these listening events shape ’InTent’, the trust’s annual engagement week. These events typically have 1-2,000 attendees, and previous topics have included team working and resilience.

The impact

Following the merger of the children’s and women’s hospitals in February 2017, nearly 2,000 people participated in events to create a vision, goals, and values for the new organisation. This is all built around the vision of ‘a world class team providing world class care’. The years 2013-2017 saw a steady increase in employee engagement scores. There is a demonstrable link with organisational performance as the trust received an outstanding Care Quality Commission rating in 2017.