Health and social care staff experience survey 2022

Introduction

Employers in Health and Social Care are committed to improving patient and public services through enhancing staff experience.

The National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care, issued earlier this year, sets out a vision of a sustainable, skilled workforce with attractive career choices where all are respected and valued for the work they do. The NHS Recovery Plan 2021-2026, which seeks to drive long term recovery and sustainability in the system, also reinforces the importance of positive staff experience in delivering positive patient outcomes.

It is therefore essential that staff at all levels are empowered to have their voices heard and valued, and staff views and actions contribute to continuous improvement in their teams and organisations.

The iMatter Continuous Improvement Model was developed by NHSScotland staff with the aim of engaging all staff in a way that feels right for them. The focus is on team-based understanding of experience, but it also offers information at various levels within organisations to evidence and help improve staff experience. As such, it can provide clarity on where to focus efforts for maximum impact, which in turn leads to better care, better health, and better value.

iMatter was initially rolled out over a three-year period from 2015 to 2017 to all staff across NHSScotland and the wider Health and Social Care Partnership community who chose to participate. Since then, it has run each year, except for 2020, when a shorter pulse survey was run instead due to the pandemic. The implementation of iMatter has enabled us to obtain a comprehensive picture of staff experience, indicating areas of success and improvement, and helping to inform delivery on the commitments of our Staff Governance Standard.

The work to measure and report staff experience within the Health and Social Care for 2022 was commissioned by the Scottish Government and carried out by Webropol Ltd, an independent company.

iMatter Process

The iMatter questionnaire enables staff the opportunity to feed back their experience within their team and at organisational level on a real-time basis. iMatter results are directly reported at all levels throughout an organisation. Once team results are delivered, teams are invited to collectively share responsibility for developing an action plan within an 8-week period and to review actions and progress made throughout the year. As an integral part of the iMatter process, teams come together to review the results and share thoughts and ideas in order to develop and implement Action Plans. See Appendix 1 for further details.

Data Collection

The iMatter process uses Webropol to distribute electronic and paper questionnaires to NHSScotland employees, as well as those employed by the Local Authority who work in a Health & Social Care Partnership who chose to participate. In 2022, all 22 Health Boards and 29 H & SCPs took part (see Appendix 2 for details).

For 2022 all fieldwork was carried out between 16 May to 8 August 2022. The 2022 questionnaire contains all that was in 2021. Further details of the questionnaire are included in Appendix 3.

Classifying Boards

Boards can be broadly allocated to one of three groups:

• Geographic Boards: those that provide regional healthcare services
• National Boards: those that provide support services to the organisation at a national level e.g., Public Health Scotland
• National Boards: those that provide specialist patient-facing services such as those provided by The State Hospital

Colour-coding as illustrated is used throughout the report to highlight the different types of Boards.

An overview of each Board and a link to its website is included in Appendix 4.

Geographic Boards (Patient-facing)

National Boards

(Patient-facing)

National Boards

(Support)

NHS Ayrshire & Arran

NHS Borders

NHS Dumfries & Galloway

NHS Fife

NHS Forth Valley

NHS Grampian

NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde

NHS Highland

NHS Lanarkshire

NHS Lothian

NHS Orkney

NHS Shetland

NHS Tayside

NHS Western Isles

NHS Golden Jubilee

Scottish Ambulance Service

NHS 24

The State Hospital

Healthcare Improvement Scotland

Public Health Scotland

NHS Education for Scotland

National Services Scotland

Response Rate Threshold

The previous response rate requirement of 60% for teams of 5 or more to receive an EEI report was removed in 2021. The 100% response rate for teams of 4 or less to generate a report remains a requirement for 2022. This is to ensure anonymity and the higher the response rate, the more realistic the feedback of how staff feel about working in their team.

iMatter Report 2022

This report provides detailed information and analysis of the iMatter responses for 2022. It also contains comparisons to previous years 2021 where appropriate. The Everyone Matters Pulse Survey (EMPS) carried out in 2020 focused on well-being and included only a small number of iMatter metrics. As the different questionnaire content may influence the way in which staff answered individual questions, the data is not included within the main historic iMatter comparisons in this report. Some EMPS data is included within the Change Experienced section of this report.

The findings from this report will be used by a range of stakeholders, including:

• Individual organisations (Health Boards and local authorities)
• The Scottish Government
• Partnership Groups such as the Staff Governance Committee (SWAG), the Scottish Partnership Forum (SPF) and the Scottish Workforce

Team Stories

The iMatter process is supported by Team Stories, that provide best practice examples of how to address challenges and provide inspiration and ideas for other teams and for the organisation as a whole. Illustrations from Team Stories are included through the report. Appendix 5 has a full list of Team Stories submitted this year.

Note: As a direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation faced by Health and Social Care at the time, Team Stories were not requested in 2021.

Statistical Analysis

Significance testing has been carried out on the data and a summary is included in Appendix 6.

Whole Number Reporting

As with previous years, all iMatter 2022 results are reported to the nearest whole numbers i.e. without any decimal places shown. This is the case for both Board level and national reporting and applies to the presentation of the various scores and index values calculated from the individual survey responses. Whilst this approach does potentially hide some significant movements in the total Health and Social Care data and within some of the larger Boards, reporting whole numbers only ensure focus is on those movements that are most statistically significant. This approach has been agreed, in partnership, by Scottish Workforce and Staff Governance Secretariat.