Health and wellbeing interventions to support staff

The Society of Occupational Medicine (SOM) has published a report looking at the most effective measures to support staff wellbeing in the NHS – here’s an overview

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on NHS Employers

The report was carried out by researchers working across Birkbeck, the University of London, the University of Nottingham and the University of Sheffield, and includes current literature reviews, practitioner interviews and in-depth case studies on this topic.  

Key drivers

A series of key drivers are identified in the report as central to improving staff health and wellbeing. These drivers exist at different levels within an organisation and need to be backed up by evidence-based interventions:

• Autonomy
• Leadership
• Organisational culture
• Good team relationships

Key characteristics

The findings indicate there is no single intervention that would resolve staff health and wellbeing in the NHS, but they do indicate common characteristics across a range of organisational interventions that can impact change. Interventions found to be most successful were:  

• Organisation-wide 
• Developed with staff involvement  
• Involved visible leadership 
• Had long-term implementation. 

The report also shows that even small health and wellbeing interventions can build confidence among staff and contribute to wider organisational success.  

Report aims

• Identify examples of organisational interventions to improve NHS staff wellbeing 
• Map how these interventions attempt to reduce demands on and increase resources for individuals, groups, leaders, organisations and overarching context 
• Identify the barriers and facilitators of success for organisational interventions 
• Summarise key recommendations to encourage more, and better, organisational interventions to support staff wellbeing. 

Organisational and individual interventions

The report also looks at whether interventions should be primarily whole-organisation or system-wide approaches compared with individual intervention such as resilience training. It shows that whole organisation approaches generally have more long-term impact, however they can be challenging to develop and sustain.  Individual interventions can have an impact but may be on a limited scale with effects lost over time.  

In both types of intervention, the following were identified as success factors: 

• Understanding staff wellbeing as a systemic issue generated from overall staff experience 
  • Tailored interventions around organisational context (not one size fits all)  
  • Involving staff in development and delivery of interventions 
  • Visible support from leaders, especially boards and clinical leadership 
  • A continual process, with ability to reshape intervention to respond to changing circumstances 
  • A long-term commitment; shifting behaviour takes time and the impact may not be immediate.  

Key considerations

Staff involvement and participation is a key theme for successful sustainable interventions. It should cover both the process (how an intervention operates) and goal (what it will do and how outcomes will be measured). This will not only deliver better health and wellbeing activity but will also boost staff engagement.  

The study does not go into detail on how interventions were evaluated but does emphasise the need for measurement of impact. In most cases there are ‘before and after’ measures of impact on staff via surveys. Interventions are complex and context dependant and not all of them were successful. Lessons should be learned even where the intervention did not work out as intended.