What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust employs approximately 12,000 staff and 4-5,000 bank staff across 14 hospitals and community sites, and deliver health and social care to half a million children and adults in Northumbria and North Tyneside.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, staff from other trust projects were re-assigned to the Staff Health and Wellbeing team when the existing members of the team were redeployed.  This new trust collaboration included the Staff Experience team, staff psychology services, public health consultant, staff Health and wellbeing lead, Occupational Health, communications and Human Resource.

This new partnership developed additional Covid-related support and resources for all Trust staff (including students) whether at work, self-isolating or shielding, and accessible in all localities. The health and wellbeing resources became available between March and mid-April 2020.

These resources need to be evaluated now to ensure they continue to be accessible and appropriate to meet staff future needs.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The Health and Wellbeing team intend to collaborate with Fuse (The Centre for Translational Research in Public Health) to understand what additional resources made a difference, for which staff groups, and why.  In addition, the evaluation needs to establish how resources were accessed, and if any particular staff groups were inadvertently disadvantaged by the design, delivery method or accessibility of the resources.  The evaluation will link with findings from “Corona Voice” (a weekly staff survey funded and analysed by the Health Foundation) to build a comprehensive picture of staff needs and suggestions.

The evaluation will also explore what learning can be applied from the streamlined/fast-tracked processes of accountability and implementation during the pandemic, and transfer that learning to post-pandemic processes.

The learning from the evaluation will be used to support staff in future pandemic phases or times of emergency.

How will the project be delivered?

The Health and Wellbeing team and Fuse will collaborate to analyse existing data and also gather new data.

Examples of research questions:

How did the resources affected staff mental health when at work, motivation to be at work, and influenced wellbeing outside work?
How did the line managers pack work in practice? Which level of managers accessed it (and who didn’t), who used the contents, and how useful was the pack?
How can the resources be improved to support staff in future pandemic phases or times of emergency? What facilitated the streamlined/ fast-track the implementation of the resources across the Trust and how can this learning be transferred to post-pandemic processes?

Work package 1: Using the existing data

Analysis of the Corona Voice free text comments and social media responses to Health and Wellbeing initiatives
Descriptive statistical analysis of staff sickness (both of those who were working at time of illness, and those reporting sickness during self-isolation/shielding).
Work package 2: Gathering new data

Online questionnaire with staff across the workforce and localities
Interviews or focus groups with Health and Wellbeing/Staff Experience team and other staff groups

How is your project going to share learning?

Collaborating with Fuse means that the Trust has access to extensive Fuse’s expertise in knowledge mobilisation build up in the last 12 years. The Health and Wellbeing team will be involved at all stages of the research and as such, have the opportunity to co-organise research meetings with other policy and practice partners for dialogue on emerging research finding, co-develop tailored research briefs with clear policy and practice recommendations (www.fuse.ac.uk/briefs) and contribute to blogs (https://fuseopenscienceblog.blogspot.com) on an award-winning blog that is widely read across the region and beyond.

The evaluation findings will be shared with senior trust management and with staff via the trust email and intranet. The staff Health and Wellbeing team are also keen to share the evaluation findings with staff in other organisations and are interested in developing practice guidelines by linking with interested Q members.