Refreshed Staff Health and Wellbeing strategy will be a catalyst for delivering real and lasting change for all
Well at Work – the refreshed Staff Health and Wellbeing Strategy, is now available to read online or download for all colleagues working in health and social care in south east London.
Informed by extensive consultation and engagement with partners and staff working across the system, the strategy aims to identify and understand the barriers that prevent staff from having a positive experience at work, and seeks to be a catalyst for delivering real, lasting and positive change.
A well-supported workforce is critical to the delivery of quality services, so it is vital to prioritise the health and wellbeing of our staff. A key aim of the Staff Health & Wellbeing (SH&WB) Committee has been to use the refreshed strategy to foster a compassionate and inclusive workplace culture and promote effective access to health and wellbeing support for our `one workforce` – regardless of where they work in our system.
As outlined in the June edition of this newsletter, the recently refreshed strategy builds upon and updates the first health and wellbeing strategy published in the wake of the pandemic. With the launch of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan and the SEL ICS People Strategy last year, the SH&WB Committee saw an important opportunity to take stock of existing priorities and plans to ensure they were still relevant and impactful within the new context we are all now working in.
The committee will be encouraging partner organisations to adopt a co-productive approach with their staff to ensure that all those in health and care work together within and across our organisations large and small, to tackle the challenges arising from how our organisations work, which can negatively impact on staff health and wellbeing.
Chloe Harris, Head of People and Culture, SEL ICS said: “I am very excited that we are now able to share our refreshed SH&WB strategy – and for the first time, a new single-page summary which we hope will enable as many of our busy staff to read it as possible. Both the Summary and the full version of Well at Work are available to read here, but the Summary and full strategy are also available to download.
“We want this work to make a tangible and lasting difference. Through the development of this strategy we identified the key sources of stress highlighted in the feedback from our research and staff engagement, and have sought to show how we’re going to work together to ensure a more supportive environment where staff feel safe, supported and can thrive.
“Stress at work is caused by a number of factors, increasing staff turnover and making it harder for us to recruit. So, now more than ever, we need to prioritise and focus our resources on the areas that will make the biggest difference.
“We’ve made some important progress, such as introducing the highly successful Breathe Arts workshops for all SEL health and care staff, and funding various borough-based pilot schemes to tackle key issues such as workplace safety.
“But there is much more we can do to ensure fairer and more consistent provision of support for all, especially for those colleagues who work for smaller providers with more limited resources.
“To be successful we must therefore use the benefits of system working to share our amazing collective expertise, best practice and resources where we can. We must also continue to involve staff in developing solutions, which is why collaboration and co-production is such a major theme of our work.
“Now we have established our priorities and direction of travel we will be working with our partners to deliver against these. Well at Work is a live document however and so we plan to review our plans again in about 18 months to ensure they remain relevant and achievable.
“In the meantime, I would like to thank the SH&WB committee and our co-chairs, Nick and Neil – and all those brilliant colleagues who have worked with us to inform and devise this strategy and have committed to helping us deliver it over the coming months – all of which will help us ensure SE London continues to be a great place to work.”