Productive Ward: Pulling together on staff sickness

In my last blog, I talked about some of the information that is shown on our information board: one of these pieces of information being the sickness rates of our staff. As you can probably appreciate this caused a bit of consternation within our team, and from some of the comments I get when showing visitors around, I am asked about the impact this has on our staff.

Although at first it can appear that this information is in danger of being a bit ‘big brother-ish’, it does help with staff understanding of the impact that can be experienced if sickness rates are massively high. From collating this information and the weekly meetings with all staff that occur at the information board, this one piece of data has enabled me to explain to staff what those impacts can be: both from a patient safety and staff morale point of view as well as the financial implications it has, and the difficulty we can face in trying to replace those staff hours on the ward area. Another impact on this rate may be peer and self pressure: we are all very proud of the positive changes that we are making within our ward; we all want to come to work and experience only the  ‘normal’ pressures of our jobs and we don’t want to ‘let each other down’.

Inside job

When a sickness rate is as high as 30% we all know we aren’t going to have that nice shift, with our team mates that know the area and understand our own unspoken rules and systems. Those things that, however excellent an ‘outside’ member of staff may be, whether from another ward / department or hospital environment, they cannot pick up all our foibles in one 7.5 or 12 hour shift – even if you can get cover on short notice.

And as we all know, if the shift is short-staffed, it can make it a tough experience for the staff on duty. BUT, do our staff always know how difficult it is to ‘replace’ those hours, both in terms of actually getting someone else who is available to work, and also doing this within the constraints of a budget? When you cannot fill that shift, do they know why?

The other use that this information has is as a reality check. How is morale in your area? Are staff feeling supported and valued?

Honest answers

Whilst it is not necessarily information that staff should have to worry about (budgets/staffing worries), having an understanding of what the impact is gives people the opportunity to ask questions and also offer suggestions to help alleviate any problems they may see as being possible roots of an issue. After all, they are the ones being impacted. If you ask the questions, be prepared for the answers!

Having this information displayed is not the thing that has improved absence rates within our area, nor has it ‘forced’ people not to be unwell. It has enabled all our team to identify what may have been one of the stressors within our area, and also to appreciate the improvements we, as a team, are making.

However, this can only be achieved with other ‘productive’ systems. Good HR support, good occupational health support and flexibility within a system to facilitate changes in working patterns to promote staff wellbeing, to name but a few. And by remembering that we never question the genuineness of someone’s absence, ever.

With few changes, the team that are now exhibiting a lower absence level, is the same team that were experiencing increased levels of ill-health absence, only a short time ago – and that level had been present for quite a while.

By using this information, in line with other data that is collected both as part of the productive ward process, but also all the other information we are expected to collect, collate and remember (incident forms, infection control information, budget, spending, vacancies…staff birthdays etc), we are able to evidence patterns that we have known about for years, but can now show as hard data.

We all know that having our own team available to work within our areas, and in the correct numbers, makes a difference to staff morale, quality of care and safety of patients. Having the data available that is used in the productive ward programme, enables trends and patterns to be identified very quickly – and can be seen very easily. Transparency is something that we are all striving for, this is one of the ways we can help to provide it, whilst learning lessons from the information that we collect.

Just as a by-line, Kerry and her team have been nominated for an award - I’ll let you know how they get on soon!

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