The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is using the Health and Wellbeing Framework each month to track incremental changes

What we’ve done

Who we are

The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust provides acute services from two hospitals in London, serving over half a million people a year. We have a workforce of over 3,800 people, including medical, nursing, midwifery and health visiting staff; other health professionals; clinical support; corporate staff; facilities staff; and volunteers.

What we did

Good staff health and wellbeing will help us recruit and retain people and provide the best care. We are using the Health and Wellbeing Framework to monitor our activities. We are a small trust with one health and wellbeing lead, so we need to prioritise.

The wellbeing lead completed the Framework’s diagnostic tool and is reviewing it monthly as a way to ‘check in’ on progress, using the tool’s simple graphs. The Framework highlighted new areas to focus on and we have added actions to our Health and Wellbeing Action Plan. For instance, we identified  the need to promote current wellbeing offers more and gain feedback from staff about what they want. We are planning more staff recognition events to help people feel valued.

It is important to be realistic about what the tool offers. If a single lead completes it alone, then it only includes one perspective. Other organisations might find it helpful to have a meeting where different stakeholders share their views about elements of the tool, including frontline staff and leaders.

“The Framework is quite large so we would encourage organisations to read it a few times to get your head around it and involve a number of people in completing it. You can also add questions specific to your Trust.” – Trust representative

It is probably not realistic to see measurable change in a short period because progress takes time. Similar organisations within a local area could share their results to benchmark against each other and get ideas about different initiatives to try. It helps to meet with others to reinforce that we are all in the same boat.