High Impact Changes for Health and Wellbeing 5: Encourage Staff to take Personal Responsibility for their Own Health

The NHS faces a huge challenge to reduce its sickness absence rate to an average of 3.4% throughout the year 2013/14. All NHS organisations have a part to play in helping to achieve this goal and each Trust needs to develop a clear focus on staff health and well-being, as outlined in the Department of Health’s NHS Health and Well-Being Improvement Framework.This hot topic is the final in a series of five documents, linked to the high impact changes.Healthier staff deliver better care to patients and are more productive. The previous Hot Topics have looked at how NHS organisations can best prevent workplacerelated ill-health and when ill-health does occur what activities and actions can ensure timely return to work. This Hot Topic focuses on how staff can also help themselvesMore in the series:   

•     Strong visible leadership
•     Local evidence-based improvement plans
•     Supported by improved management capability
•     Access to better, local high quality accredited occupational health services
•     Staff are encouraged, and enabled, to take more personal responsibility