NHS leadership and culture: The King's Fund position (2019)

Summary

Collaborative, inclusive and compassionate leadership is essential to deliver the highest quality care for patients and tackle deep-seated cultural issues in the NHS, including unacceptable levels of work-related stress, bullying and discrimination.

Staff are the NHS’s greatest asset, but a number of challenges are taking a significant toll on the workforce. In addition to severe workforce pressures, including large numbers of staff vacancies, surveys have shown that staff experiences of working in the NHS can be very negative. In the 2018 NHS staff survey, 40 per cent of NHS staff reported feeling unwell as a result of work-related stress in the previous 12 months, 13 per cent said they had experienced bullying or harassment from managers and 19 per cent experienced it from other colleagues.

This article gives the response from the Kingsfund on the recent NHS staff survey.