Substantial support for staff wellbeing

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.