Every two years we conduct a Health Needs Assessment (HNA) with #TeamGateshead as part of Better Health At Work Award (BHAWA) accreditation work.

The BHAWA programme is all about addressing workplace wellbeing issues, and the HNA is the tool we use to best understand what those issues look like to you.

This year’s survey is now live and available to complete via the following link. You’ll be able to submit a response until Sunday 17th August, giving colleagues around one month to have their say on our wellbeing offer and how we can improve it. The survey should take between 10 – 15 minutes to complete.

What’s new with the latest Health Needs Assessment?

Through this year’s HNA, we also want to use your feedback to inform a new staff health and wellbeing strategy. So while the new strategy will continue to look at what else we can do to support you through wellbeing issues and concerns, this time we’re also placing more emphasis on better understanding drivers of poor wellbeing at work.

This will help us develop a new approach which matches efforts on ensuring you can access effective support with a new focus on prevention and enabling better wellbeing at work. 

The new outlook is reflective of your 2024 Staff Survey feedback, where you told us what has the biggest impact on your wellbeing at work are generally issues that are more deeply rooted in getting your experience at work right. Support offers are always handy when in need – but you’ve told us we could and should be doing more to avoid being the cause of wellbeing issues in the first instance.

In outreach work we’ve been doing with teams since we got those results, we’ve found a lot of common themes around elements of staff experience that enable good wellbeing at work – inclusive of examples like:

  • feeling as though you are able to make a genuine difference to patients and understanding your job role
  • having the right training and development opportunities and chances to progress
  • having the support of visible and proactive leaders
  • feeling your own and your team’s work is valued and understood across the organisation
  • feeling recognised for the efforts you put in
  • being able to work flexibly and with a reasonable degree of autonomy and trust
  • and a lot more!

But ultimately, a lot of you have told us – whether through the staff survey or this outreach work with teams, that there is room for improvement across these areas. The HNA is a tool that helps us prioritise based on what you think is most important – and give you a direct opportunity to contribute ideas for us to take forward, too.

Setting teams and colleagues up for success:

The proposed new approach then effectively means placing more emphasis on setting you up for success. Having spent years building a comprehensive package of support across various wellbeing concerns and needs (which will of course remain available and continue to be developed regardless), this means spending more time focusing on how we prevent poor wellbeing and ill health at work, not just preparing how we can to react to it.

This should mean that when we use your feedback and ideas to inform our new staff wellbeing strategy, there should be a slight shift in direction  – one that will hopefully result in broader but more impactful projects around staff experience issues and the concerns that impact you at work.

Of course, we’re always open to thoughts and feedback so if you want to get in touch, please do so on [email protected]. Otherwise, please spare the time to complete the HNA and arm us with the data we need to build a strategy that best reflects your biggest workplace wellbeing concerns.

Dale Jones
Health and Wellbeing Manager

Take the Health Needs Assessment now!