Guest blog for Occupational Health Awareness Week by John Drew, Director of Staff Experience and Engagement, NHS England and NHS Improvement
Launching our NHS Growing Occupational Health and Wellbeing (GOHWB) Together strategy as part of OH Awareness Week is a significant step forward in advancing our ambitions within the NHS People Plan and the People Promise of "we are safe and healthy". This strategy represents the NHS roadmap for growing our OHWB services and professionals for the next five years, increasing the influence and impact they have in supporting the health and wellbeing our staff.
The strategy is a culmination of a substantial period of engagement and co-design. It captures the excellent and inspiring work already going on across occupational health (OH) and wellbeing services; and how OH and wellbeing services have made a unique and crucial contribution to the health and wellbeing of NHS staff since March 2020 and especially during the pandemic, and finally our collective ambition for OH and wellbeing in the NHS in the long term.
The strategy is not the end of the journey, of course. NHS England is working with a wide range of national partners including SOM, the Faculty of Occupational Medicine (FOM), the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), Health at Work, NHS Employers, Health Education England (HEE), trade unions, and working with our Integrated Care System and NHS organisational leaders to realise the ambition within the strategy. Most importantly, our OHWB professionals have very much shaped this and have a key role in leading the implementation.
As people working in the NHS, one of our most basic instincts and core values is to care for others. The pandemic has been a very public reminder of the fact that the NHS is all about people, and that we need to care for the carers for it to deliver what we expect of it. A palpable way we can demonstrate that care is to promote the value of OH and wellbeing services, and encourage investment in and nurturing of the people and services who are part of those services. Time and again, it has been proven the best way to care for patients is to care for our people and that enabling OHWB people and services to fulfil their part in that will better enable NHS people to care for patients and users.
The NHS Growing Occupational Health and Wellbeing Together strategy builds on this idea, and articulates a five year vision for:
- growing OHWB services,
- growing OHWB professionals,
- growing OHWB’s strategic identity,
- growing the impact of OHWB.
As we now move to implementation, I’ll be working with my team and our partners to facilitate, support and enable our entire OHWB community to help realise the strand of the People Promise that says “we are safe and healthy” and able to pass good care onto our patients.
The NHS Growing Occupational Health and Wellbeing Together strategy can be thought of as a collaborative roadmap to inspire and equip our NHS OHWB leaders to apply in their own context using things within the ‘toolkit’ to galvanise their teams and make change happen in a way that gives them energy and will bring benefits to them and their service.
I want to take this opportunity to ask you to join in with this and work with my team and the many champions of OHWB up and down the country in our shared effort to make the vision a reality. No one person or organisation can realise all the opportunities in front of us, but together, collectively, this is a vision we can bring to life. I also want to thank OHWB professionals and NHS leaders who have already done so much to support their colleagues, often establishing new services and dealing with a step change increase in demand during the pandemic. What you have done has been truly impressive and shows what is possible, and the creativity and leadership needed to make it happen, and this strategy, gives us a way to do that together and at a more measured and sustainable pace.
We will be publishing the strategy shortly and will continue to update you with plans and opportunities to be involved, via SOM and other partners.
This is the second in our series of guest blogs written for Occupational Health Awareness Week 2022 (19-24th June). John Drew is Director of Staff Experience and Engagement, NHS England and NHS Improvement.