A healthy and thriving workforce is essential for attracting and retaining health and social care staff, enabling them to deliver safe and high-quality patient care. However, many health and wellbeing staff experience stress, burnout and psychological ill-health putting pressure on individuals, teams and services, and estimated to cost the NHS £12.1 billion a year.
What’s the problem?
This work builds on national wellbeing initiatives and our previous NIHR-funded research. This includes the Care Under Pressure programme which investigated why poor psychological wellbeing persists and interventions have had limited impact. Evidence showed providing prompt, high quality, person-centered care for patients while meeting the needs of the workforce is a complex, dynamic balancing act. Often the needs of the system override staff needs, leading to a system out of balance and where staff wellbeing is not optimised. The CARES-Well project will test, refine and build on this foundation to support the creation of healthier workplaces where staff can thrive.
What is this project doing?
Working in partnership with health and social care colleagues to identify how to create healthy workplaces where staff will want to work, feel productive and can thrive.
The project has two phases. Over the first 2 years we will build strong partnership working with stakeholders, and fill gaps in existing knowledge by collecting, synthesising and analysing data from surveys, interviews and previous research. This evidence will be shared with stakeholders in a co-design process to work out what, where and how phase two will be delivered in years 3-5.
The project aims to enable health and social care employers to support staff so that they can thrive, even under pressure, and help prevent work-related psychological harm.
Chief Investigator(s):
Co-investigators:
Dr Daniele Carrieri, Dr Emily Williams, Dr Magdalena Zasada, Dr Ruth Abrams, Mr Daniel Lucy, Mr Kevin Croft, Mrs Safina Nadeem, Professor Anne Spencer, Professor Annette Boaz, Professor Jeremy Dawson, Professor Karen Mattick
Partner Organisations:
- University of Surrey
- University of Exeter
- King’s College London
- Imperial College NHS Trust
- NHS Frimley
- University of Sheffield
- Institute for Employment Studies