Substantial support for staff wellbeing
Abstract
Sam Foster, Chief Nurse, Oxford University Hospitals, outlines a programme aiming to support the pyschological wellbeing of staff not just in the aftermath of the pandemic response, but for the long term
Many have asked what NHS Charities Together—the national charity supporting the NHS, for which Captain Sir Tom Moore raised £33 million—has funded. This week we heard that a bid led by my Trust's Clinical Director for Psychological Medicine, Dr Simon Pangnell, had been successful in obtaining a grant. Our proposal was simple: to ‘address the psychological wellbeing of the workforce’.
I have previously discussed interventions to support the recovery of our people following the response during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme put forward here is important as it goes way beyond the pandemic response, and addresses concerns that I have that the NHS might rush an ‘in the moment’, quick fix solution and not consider the long-term investment needs for staff wellbeing. Before the pandemic, the prevalence of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in healthcare staff was already well documented. Within my Trust, mental health-related reasons were among the most common reported causes of sickness absence. Mental health accounted for 20% of all sickness absence in 2019/2020 with a total of 21 053 lost working days. Aside from the personal effect on our staff, this has a substantial economic impact—the total cost of those lost days in my Trust was £1 035 014.
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