Another record-breaking year for our staff survey results
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has achieved its fourth consecutive year of improvements in the national NHS staff survey, with 2024 results published today. Our results top the previous year’s best ever scores and buck the trend nationally on many questions.
We achieved statistically significant improvements in three themes – ‘we are safe and healthy’, ‘we work flexibly’ and ‘morale’ – while the previous year’s improved scores for the remaining six themes held steady. We are now above the average for acute trusts for eight of the nine themes, up from seven out of nine in 2023. While we are slightly below average for one theme – ‘we work flexibly’ – it is the theme which saw the biggest improvement.
With nearly 1,000 more staff completing the survey – giving a 65.2 per cent response rate compared with the acute trust average of 49 per cent – it allows us to be more confident that the results are a true reflection of our staff’s working lives.
Encouragingly, the proportion of staff who would recommend the Trust as a place to work also saw a statistically significant improvement, to 70.7 per cent, now ten percentage points higher than the acute trust average (up from eight points ahead in 2023). And, while the proportion of staff who say they would be happy with the standard of care we provide if a friend or relative needed treatment remained steady at 74.5 per cent, this is now 13 percentage points above the acute trust average (up from ten points ahead in 2023).
Other highlights include:
- For the theme ‘staff engagement’ – a particularly important indicator – we moved further ahead of the acute Trust average, with last year’s improved score staying steady, while the acute Trust average score fell.
- We are now very close to being the best scoring acute trust in the country for the theme of ‘we are always learning’.
- Improvements in a range of questions relating to workforce race equality standards, including the proportion of staff believing that our organisation provides equal opportunities for career progression or promotion rising by nearly 1.5 percentage points for white staff and three percentage points for staff from all other ethnic backgrounds, against no change to the acute trust average for both groups, moving us above the average for the first time.
Chief executive Professor Tim Orchard said: “The results reflect a lot of hard work across our organisation, including initiatives responding to previous staff survey results, such as setting up a multi-disciplinary taskforce to tackle the increase in violence and aggression across our sites, involving hundreds of staff and local community representatives in co-designing our anti-racism and anti-discrimination commitments, expanding our bespoke line management training programme and running a targeted flexible working campaign.
“With a fourth consecutive year of improvement, we have shown that it pays to make these kind of investments – it’s good for our staff but also for our patients and our local communities. Staff who feel valued, engaged and part of a single team with a clear sense of direction provide better care. We can see the impact in our much improved vacancy and retention rates and across a range of quality and operational indicators.
“As we approach the new financial year, this progress will really help us as the whole of the NHS faces a particularly challenging financial ask. That’s not to be complacent, there is still much more to do, especially to continue to build a fairer organisation, but we are definitely moving in the right direction.”
Access the national staff survey website, with local results available for each Trust
