National survey of NHS staff 2006

In October 2006, a total of 240,580 staff in the NHS were asked about their views and experiences of working for the NHS in England in the fourth annual survey of NHS staff. The survey is believed to be the largest annual staff survey in the world and this year 128,328 NHS employees took part, representing 53.6%.

PCTs who were reconfigured in October 2006 were not required to participate in this year’s survey and we will not use the data from the 2006 staff survey to assess these PCTs in the 2006/2007 annual health check.

The 2006 survey provides information on the attitudes and experiences of staff in the NHS and can be used to improve working conditions and practices in healthcare services and therefore the quality of care provided to patients.

All trusts have received their own survey results, along with detailed information about how these compare with other trusts. The results from this survey help to meet two of the Commission’s objectives:

to provide local NHS trusts with information to improve the working conditions and experiences of their staff
to provide results for deriving measures of the performance of NHS trusts for use in the Healthcare Commission’s annual health check

Key findings

Below you can download a summary of the key findings for each type of trust, which include any major changes from the previous surveys, as well as spreadsheets containing the data for each question by type of trust, and feedback and summary reports for individual trusts:

Acute trusts (pdf 708kb) (opens new window)

Ambulance trusts (pdf 739kb) (opens new window)

Mental health and learning disability trusts (pdf 707kb) (opens new window)

Primary care trusts (pdf 719kb) (opens new window)

The Healthcare Commission wishes to continue to capture the views and experiences of staff working in the NHS, and the next national survey of NHS staff will be carried out in autumn 2007.

Feedback and summary reports

To download benchmarked feedback reports and summary reports for each individual trust, please click on one of the links below. The organisations are listed by type and in alphabetical order.

Published March 30th 2007:

A-Z list of acute trusts

A-Z list of mental health and learning disability trusts

A-Z list of primary care trusts

A-Z list of care trusts

A-Z list of ambulance trusts

Making sense of your survey of staff data

Details of the ‘key scores’ (defined as the 28 scores derived from the survey identified as covering the issues that are most important to trusts) presented in the feedback and summary reports are available at the link below. There is also information about differences in results from previous years, the confidence intervals, and the procedures used to ‘weight’ results. Further information on the detailed spreadsheets is also provided here, as well as details of how the survey if staff results feed into: Improving Working Lives assessments; the Health and Safety Executive audit requirements; and the core standards within the Healthcare Commission’s annual health check system for 2006/2007.

Making sense of your staff survey data (pdf 111kb) (opens new window)