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<p>Employers across the National Health Service are responsible for protecting the
mental health of their staff. This has been identified as a priority in the interim
NHS People Plan, published on 3 June, which says “we will develop a new offer with
our people setting out explicitly the support they can expect from the NHS as a modern
employer”….“Ensuring everyone feels they have voice, control and influence, including
a focus on (amongst other issues) staff physical and mental health and wellbeing and
reducing sickness absence”.</p><p>This new offer will be developed over the summer
and published in the final People Plan after the Government’s spending review later
this year. It is expected to address the staffing pressures causing stress and burnout
by implementing recommendations from the recent Health Education England report on
NHS staff and learner wellbeing, which set out some of the most serious causes of
harm to our people’s mental health and wellbeing. Staff can already report working
excess hours via their employer’s “Guardian of Safe Practice”.</p><p>The interim People
Plan will build on the good work already underway across the NHS to protect staff
mental health through the NHS staff health and wellbeing framework which helps organisations
diagnose and implement services to meet staff needs including, for example, counselling
and talking therapies to support their mental health.</p><p>The Framework and NHS
Improvement’s NHS staff health and wellbeing collaborative of 73 trusts are incorporating
the core and enhanced mental health standards from ‘Thriving at Work – a review of
mental health and employers’ commissioned by the Government from the mental health
charity MIND.</p><p>NHS England’s 2017/19 Commissioning for Quality and Innovation
(CQUIN) incentive scheme has also been encouraging organisations to put in place appropriate
interventions to support staff mental health based on improvements to the NHS Staff
Survey question: “During the last 12 months have you felt unwell as a result of work
related stress?” with providers expected to achieve an improvement of 5% points in
the answer “no” compared to baseline staff survey results or achieve 75% of staff
surveyed answering “no”.</p><p>The Department, over a number of years, has commissioned
NHS Employers to provide a wide range of advice, guidance and good practice to support
trusts in maintaining and improving their staff mental health and wellbeing.</p>
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