This guide from NHS Employers contains analysis, advice, case studies and recommendations for how to tackle bullying and create positive cultures in ambulance trusts. It has been created by ambulance colleagues as a call to action to implement changes and improve staff experience.
Ambulance trusts across the country deliver vital services to the population. Staff work in challenging situations, often under extreme pressure. Despite this, the quality of care delivered remains high.
However, the NHS including ambulance trusts has more work to do in creating positive and healthy workplace cultures and ensuring zero tolerance of bullying and harassment.
Bullying has serious consequences on mental and physical health. The staff opinion survey in ambulance trusts provides the data on bullying and harassment where, 29 per cent of staff reported experiencing bullying, harassment or abuse from other staff members, compared to 24 per cent in the NHS overall, indicating the need for trusts to recognise this as a priority and implement improvement actions.
The report identifies four areas where staff feel bullying is more prevalent, these are:
- the way shifts are allocated
- management style
- performance management
- command and control top down culture.
This guide provides a summary of some local initiatives ambulance trusts have implemented and is a source of information and best practice from which others can learn.
A checklist of activities is included which can be used to flag where organisations might want to focus more attention to help tackle bullying and harassment. The report concludes with recommendations for ambulance trusts to put into action. You can read it here.
The report was endorsed by The National Ambulance Social Partnership Forum on 5 November 2018 and should be read in conjunction with the NASPF Call To Action document.
