ImproveWell included in report on interventions to tackle the UK Government’s biggest challenges

5 September 2024

Examples of ImproveWell’s positive impact on staff retention, engagement and wellbeing have been cited in a report on how the new UK government can tackle its biggest challenges. 

Nesta, an independent UK charity focused on innovation for social good, published Health and social care: the ideas, outlining eight ideas policymakers should urgently consider.

As part of their idea to Make NHS staff wellbeing a strategic priority: improving data collection and transparency, testing wellbeing interventions, and scaling the ones that work, they state, “there is currently neither a sufficiently timely nor actionable picture of workforce wellbeing, or a strong mandate to invest in wellbeing measures.”

Nesta goes on to explain this means discussions around workforce wellbeing are often problem-focused, rather than solutions-focused, and successful initiatives are rarely scaled. They say that collecting accurate and timely data is critical to de-risking decisions taken by the NHS, ensuring that it is better set up to drive and scale innovation, and critical to ensuring that a system-wide shift towards being mission-led sticks.

ImproveWell is then cited as an ‘intervention idea’ – an idea that could be scaled up to help make NHS staff wellbeing a priority. The platform is mentioned as one that could be complemented by the rollout of one of their recommendations; an NHS Workforce Wellbeing Dashboard to provide more timely feedback from staff. 

The three ImproveWell success stories shared by the report were:

• improved staff retention and morale at the Southern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland, with dramatic declines in turnover and more successful recruitment, 
• significant jumps in the number of staff who feel they can easily share ideas (from 57% to 91%) and the number of staff who feel their ideas were listened to (from 57% to 72%) at the Burns Service, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and
• improved morale across the 38 teams who took part in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Enjoying Work national programme. Weekly survey results showed a 41% improvement in the percentage of people who are experiencing no symptoms of burnout.

Lara Mott, CEO and Co-Founder of ImproveWell, said: “Our platform was created because there was no easy path for frontline workers to share how their workday was, as well as their valuable ideas for improvement. Or, when asked, there was a significant lag in reporting or translating this feedback into action. 

“It’s great that the importance of real-time feedback is recognised in this report – we’ve seen through our success stories that capturing ideas for improvement and feedback in a timely and clear way, particularly from those at the sharp end of delivering care, can lead to quick changes that save resources in the long run. We look forward to discussing this report with policymakers, and we hope they urgently act on its recommendations to help solve the NHS workforce crisis and scale up the impact we’re already making in improving NHS staff wellbeing.”

For further information please contact:

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020 3475 0670