The national NHS Staff Survey is a yearly anonymous survey to get your feedback about how it feels at work, so that we can make things work better for our colleagues.

Our pharmacy team have embraced the results from the past two years and are bringing in real change to improve colleague wellbeing and work lives across the service.

Clinical Director of Pharmacy, Lis Street, has been taking us through what the team have done.

What feedback have you heard from the NHS Staff Survey results?

We have looked at what people have told us from the NHS Staff Survey from the past two years, as it’s a great way to get anonymous feedback on how it feels to work in our service. We knew it had been a tricky couple of years in the team, and our results were a true reflection of how our colleagues were feeling.

Similar to other services, we feel the impact of operational pressures, delivering more for our patients within the resource we have. We are seeing higher levels of acuity and are going above and beyond to support earlier discharge by doing things like processing TTOs as quick as possible.

We are doing great things for our patients, but we also know that we are asking more of our colleagues on the ground, and our survey results showed that there is more we can do to support one another.  

What have you put in place and how has it made a difference?

After we got the results the senior team met to review the results and pulled together some actions to take forward. These included monthly team briefs including one for our stores team who sometimes struggled to attend the main department meeting. We also held focus groups and feedback sessions. We used these as a way to recognise how hard it has been for colleagues, but also to look forward to some improvement work and developments in the service.

These sessions allowed us to dig deeper into what we heard in the staff survey so we could make sure we were doing something about it to improve the working environment of our colleagues.

Out of these sessions we heard concerns about representation of our communities in our pharmacy workforce, education and training, civility and equity of career opportunities and flexible working.

We felt it was important to have engagement from colleagues at all levels. We’re really pushing for this as a team by not only encouraging ideas and feedback through focus groups but also encouraging 1:1 time or even 10 minutes a month to check in with colleagues to see how you are feeling. We have also bought in monthly wellbeing sessions. It can often feel difficult fitting this into a busy work schedule but we have found that these conversations give us rich feedback to enable us to make a difference within the service. We used the Work Together Get Results agreed actions to make improvements within the department.

We know we have fantastic colleagues who always want to do more to give back to others so we’re proactively supporting people to engage in activities they are passionate about. For our service that has been ongoing charity work, some of the team have made amazing efforts to raise money for our local charities.

Some examples of what we have done include three of our pharmacy senior leadership team and three of our early careers colleagues / aspiring leaders taking part in a Royal Pharmaceutical Society reciprocal mentoring pilot to encourage learning and development within the team. The aim is for individuals to learn and grow through a structured relationship centred on race equity, cultural humility, and the lived experiences of underrepresented colleagues. While the aspiring leader/inclusion advocate shares insights into the systemic and interpersonal barriers they face due to race, our senior leaders are committed to active listening, reflection, and meaningful action as an ally.

We have also looked at what colleagues have told us about our training packages and education. As a result, we have strengthened the resources available and created a new online education and development tool, Moodle. It helps hugely for Pharmacists and Pharmacy Technicians rotating to new clinical areas be aware of key guidelines and treatment protocols. The success of these new learning packages is due to strong engagement and support from colleagues and some of the speciality leads to make sure the training/ learning reflects the needs of colleagues.

Our colleagues in the workforce team have also facilitated focus group sessions on civility which has really helped improve communication across different roles in the service. These civility sessions were attended by our senior leadership team and leads for education and training. The sessions help raise our awareness of the generational differences within our team and helped us consider how we adapt our leaderships styles to best support our colleagues.

What will you put in place for the staff survey this year?

We took so much from the feedback that colleagues gave us in the past two years. We want to give colleagues across the service the time and space to be able to complete the survey, which we know can sometimes be a challenge in and amongst everything else there is to do in a day!

This year we will again be allocating specific spaces in the service, with a computer and some biscuits/sweets, where colleagues can reflect and take the time they need to complete the survey.

What have colleagues said?

Colleagues have told us:

"I found the focus group engaging and open to staff feedback and ideas. It was very helpful and made me feel assured that management have our concerns at heart following the staff survey results; there's a willingness to improve upon our department and processes. We have already started to see the impact that this has had on our services." 

"The feedback session was extremely useful for highlighting key areas for improvement. I really appreciated the opportunity to reflect on our current practices and offer my own views.

"As a group, we were able to explore practical ways of improving patient care, training and staff wellbeing. 

"Measures that have been put in place since the session send a positive message to the team that our feedback is valued. This is a big step forward in making meaningful progress within the pharmacy department."