Drawing together data and stakeholders helps prioritise

Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust brought together different data sources and a variety of stakeholders to decide what workforce wellbeing services to prioritise.

What we’ve done

Who we are

Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust provides community healthcare services for the people of Leeds. Our workforce includes more than 3,000 nurses, therapists, pharmacists, non-registered and registered clinical staff and administrators and managers. We work through neighbourhood teams, which means that our professionals work together across a defined area of the city to provide a wide range of services in people’s homes and local communities.

What we did

We used the diagnostic tool from the Health and Wellbeing Framework in three ways:

  • A senior member of our Workforce Team who leads on staff health and wellbeing used the diagnostic tool to compile their knowledge of all of the Trust’s health and wellbeing offers. This provided a good reminder of the range of things that we are doing and reinforced the positives, which can be easy to overlook when there are many other things to respond to.
  • We used the tool as a practical activity with our newly reshaped Staff Health and Wellbeing Engagement Group. The group includes our Board Wellbeing Guardian, staff members with lived experience of disability, trade union representatives, health and wellbeing champions, managers and other staff who are passionate about making a difference. We spent a meeting working through key questions from the diagnostic tool. In future meetings we will be focusing on some of the components in more detail. Once we’ve completed our self-assessment, we will use the findings to inform a staff wellbeing action plan.
  • To help us gather data for our self-assessment, we commissioned a team to map out all the health and wellbeing data that we already gather, such as from our Employee Assistance Programme, sickness absence statistics, occupational health data, the staff survey, and the Model Hospital portal. We reviewed all the information sources and considered whether we could systematically update data regularly to monitor progress.

What we’ve achieved so far

We’re at an early stage of using the Health and Wellbeing Framework, but we found the diagnostic tool easy to use, especially the RAG ratings. It highlighted areas where we are providing good support and other areas to focus on more. It can easily be used to create an action plan.

“We are all busy and there are never enough hours in the day, but using the diagnostic tool can actually save time and give you practical things to focus on to support staff wellbeing. You need to view it as a working document that you keep adding to and updating, rather than something you do as a one-off.” – Trust representative

What we’ve learnt so far

Completing the diagnostic tool as a group helps to include a wider range of experience

In some organisations health and wellbeing leads complete the self-assessment themselves. We found that using the diagnostic tool at a meeting built up partnerships and helped to hear real staff experience. We found it helpful to involve our Wellbeing Guardian from the Trust Board so they can feed back at board-level and to the senior management team, which helps to prioritise staff wellbeing.

You don’t need to complete everything at once

The diagnostic tool is organised into sections. This makes it easy to break the work down into segments to consider, such as mental wellbeing. We plan to create small task and finish groups to focus on areas for development. It is important not to let the volume in the tool put you off completing it. It is reasonably easy to complete if you work in small chunks.

There is a lot of data available about staff wellbeing

Organisations often don’t use data. Spending a little time and resource pulling everything together is a good investment because it shows where there are issues that could influence our retention, wellbeing and sickness absences.