Staff Survey 2021 – thank you from Amanda Oates

Dear colleague,

The latest national NHS Staff Survey has just been published. It provides us with valuable insight into how you’re feeling about your job and what matters to you at work.

We’re really pleased to see that overall we’ve maintained our performance from 2020. This is a significant achievement given the scale and scope of the pandemic’s impact on us all. What you told us gives us information to help us recover and to continue to develop the Mersey Care family.

Our 2022 People Plan and clinical quality focus, our team canvas and refreshed Culture of Care Barometer will all help us to improve. What you said about line management and team decision making is positive and we welcome that.

We’re disappointed to see a slight drop in staff engagement 7.2 in 2020 to 7.0 in this latest survey. However, this remains average for our sector, and we believe it shows that despite the pandemic, our links to staff remain strong.

Our extensive work on your safety at work continues to be an important focus throughout the Trust. Our Restorative, Just and Learning Culture is embedding across services and we know there’s more we can do to keep improving. These areas will form part of our planning for the coming year.

• an improvement in staff feeling secure raising concerns and that the trust would address these concerns for yours or our patients - all our scores are above the sector average
• a positive trend in staff believing they have equality of opportunity at the Trust
• a decrease in those experiencing bullying and harassment from staff or patient and service users.

We know that we still need to do more to make sure people don’t experience workplace bullying and harassment. Through our work on Civility and Respect we’re starting to address this and we’re in close partnership with staff side and our Freedom to Speak Up team. We’ve announced major objective to be an anti-racist organisation. We recognise this is a bold and aspiring statement, and we also know we are not there yet, and we have a lot more to do, but it’s absolutely the right thing to push for.

Thank you for your continued support and I know that together as a Mersey Care family we look forward to thriving in the exciting and challenging year ahead. In the next few weeks, I’ll be setting out more of what we can do to support you and more of the detail from the staff survey, with actions to make the changes you want to see happen.

The trust board will be involved and, from senior leaders through all service leads and your manager and team, we will work together as Mersey Care for our patients and for each other.

Yours sincerely,

Amanda Oates

• 648,594 staff nationally completed the survey, nearly half of all NHS employees
• The national data is supporting work into wellbeing, burnout and prevention measures
• “The NHS is nothing without the commitment and dedication of its staff…a big and very sincere thank you,” says the national Acting People Officer Em Wilkinson-Brice. You can read her full letter here.