Staff engagement in the NHS – Part 2

03 Feb 2021, posted in Blogs

It’s official – increasing staff engagement in hospitals could be an effective means of enhancing patient safety.

A report just published by Manchester University [The Association Between Health Care Staff Engagement and Patient Safety Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis] has examined the evidence and concluded that there is a significant relationship between engagement and both safety culture scores and errors/adverse events in hospitals.

The report says that engaging hospital staff by enabling them to raise concerns and contribute to service improvement can prevent poor-quality care. In addition, staff engagement can be used as a strategy for building safety into healthcare – effective systems and processes alone cannot improve safety.

The report concludes that increasing staff engagement could offer an impactful and cost-effective means of enhancing a range of patient safety outcomes. I was talking to Engage’s co-founder John Porter the other day and he summed it up really well:

“It may be a stretch to say we live and breathe staff engagement, but we certainly give it a lot of thought and we know how to help organisations make a success of engagement programs. And you don’t start with a solution, or clever tech. You start by having an honest conversation about your challenges and then figure out where the opportunities are. The tech is a tool to deliver on your ambition to do the right thing for your staff and your patients alike.”