Listening to you

The next Pulse survey is live… and your views count

Thank you to everyone who responded to our Pulse and harassment surveys earlier this year. The latest Pulse survey is now live so we wanted to update you on what we are doing to respond to the issues raised.

We are very grateful to everyone who responded to the bullying and harassment survey in February this year and to the quarterly Pulse survey in April. It is important that we understand your experiences and whether the progress we are making is helping to keep people safe.

Keeping our people safe – the harassment survey

Some 1400 of you responded to our harassment survey. I am pleased to say that in the February survey we saw an improvement in the results with a reduction in colleagues who have experienced sexual harassment in the last year.

Since the previous survey we have seen a 77% reduction in the number of staff reporting that they are currently experiencing sexual harassment and a 41% reduction in the number of staff reporting that they have experienced sexual harassment in the last 12 months.

These results are in line with those from the national NHS staff survey, that we published at the end of March, where fewer people said that they are experiencing bullying and felt more able to speak up. The national survey showed that:

• A 6% reduction in people reporting harassment, bullying or abuse
• A 5% reduction in those of you experiencing this behaviour from managers

It is positive that we are seeing progress in these areas and we are committed to continuing to do everything we can to create a safe environment for everyone, so far this has included:

• Our Speak Up, Speak Out and Stop It campaign.
• Improvements we are making in the handling of formal complaints within the workplace
• The launch of our cultural ambassadors.
• The introduction of values training, which now over 75% of our people have completed
• Requiring all managers to complete the managers’ passport training with mandatory modules on disability awareness and dignity at work.

However, one case of inappropriate behaviour is still one case too many and we are committed to continuing work to stop this behaviour at every level across the whole Trust. This is the responsibility of all of us.

We want everyone to be able to come to work without the fear and worry of being subjected to bullying and harassment and we will be publishing monthly updates on our work in this important area.

We all have a responsibility to behave appropriately at work and do the right thing for ourselves and our colleagues. Simple things, like ensuring we all complete our values and behaviours training and manager’s completing the managers passport training on Evolve are all steps in the right direction. We are providing support to managers around leadership and supporting their teams and we are developing a strategy around how we better support and develop all our people.  

If you are being bullied or harassed, we want you to Speak Up; if you see other people being bullied or harassed we want you to Speak Out against it, and if you are bulling or harassing others, to put it simply we want you to Stop.

The quarterly People Pulse survey

Last July NHSEI introduced a quarterly national pulse survey to complement the annual NHS Staff Survey. The Pulse survey will run in January, April and July with the annual survey continuing to take place in October. This survey is important for tracking levels of engagement and how supported you feel.

The survey asks important questions about your health and wellbeing, how you are feeling and why and how well informed you feel and the key issues behind that drive this.

Just over 800 people responded to the April Pulse survey. There were small increases in the number of you who feel that:

• The Trust supports your health and wellbeing
• We are supporting each other more effectively; fewer of you are feeling anxious and people are coping a little better.
• You are better informed about changes taking place within the Trust. Hopefully the regular blogs and podcasts on Fit for the Future, as our key improvement programme, and the weekly local and Trustwide Q and As are helping keep you informed.

Areas for improvement understandably include the workload and the operations pressure which is impacting on us all. I recognise we have to do more to help the service respond to the ‘new normal’ of demand and service pressure we now face.

We are also developing a programme to help develop our leaders so that they have more time to support you – and we’ll be talking about this more in the coming weeks.

Another area is communication. You would like to see senior managers listening to and consulting colleagues more. We hope that you are attending the local Q and As in your sector or directorate (at 4pm on Thursdays) so that you can put questions directly to managers. Our executive directors have been out and about during June, and now that COVID  restrictions have lifted we will be encouraging all of our senior managers do to the same.

The next Pulse survey will be available in July. Please look out for it and take a moment to share your views – we all want EEAST to be a fantastic organisation for our people and the communities we serve so we need your insight to help us on that journey.

Tom Abell
Chief Executive

Published 6th July 2022