BARNSLEY Hospital leaders have praised their workforce for going above and beyond - after the facility bucked a national trend by recording higher-than-average results in a staff survey.
The NHS survey - split into nine areas - saw more than 2,000 employees take part which rated the hospital among the best-scoring trusts in England for compassionate leadership, flexible working and team working.
Its scores across the nine themes - which also include categories such as morale, safety and staff engagement - are the highest in Yorkshire and the Humber region.
Dr Richard Jenkins, chief executive Barnsley Hospital, said: “We work extremely hard to provide quality care against increasing demands and the survey results are important because they are used to improve care for patients and working conditions for all staff.
“We have a really good set of survey results which I think reflects well on all of our staff.
“People are looking out for each other and managing each other really well.
“There is always room for improvement, and there are always organisations that are going to be better than us, so we need to keep going forward and building on this.”
Conducted nationally in every NHS organisation, it is the biggest survey of staff opinion in the UK and Barnsley Hospital’s 2,092 completed questionnaires put it 12 per cent higher than the national response rate average.
Director of workforce, Steve Ned, thanked staff for completing the survey.
He said: “Across every one of the nine themes, compared to the average, our staff have said that their experience of working in Barnsley is better than elsewhere.
“For example, under ‘compassionate and inclusive’, we scored 7.5 compared to an average of 7.2.
“On the two questions about staff recommending their organisation as a place to work, and recommending it as a place to receive treatment, while we were better than average, there is still some way to go to be regarded as the best in our comparison group.
“In terms of flexible working and team working, our staff have reported that we’re the best organisation within our comparison group which I think is really important.
“One of the things we’ve done in the last couple of years is look to where organisations are performing well.
“We have learned that flexible working provides an environment for staff to give of their best while it balances work commitments with life commitments, and it improves morale within the organisation.”
Staff were also asked in the survey about feeling ‘burnt out’, and Steve added that it has been a battle to address fatigue owing to the knock-on impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on workloads.
“This was a real issue both in Barnsley and the wider NHS because of what staff have been through in terms of both operational pressures and the pandemic.”
