Abstract
Supported Wellbeing Centres have been set up in UK hospital trusts in an effort to mitigate the psychological impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers, although the extent to which these are utilised and the barriers and facilitators to access are not known. The aim of the study was to determine facility usage and gather insight into employee wellbeing and the views of employees towards this provision. The study included (i) 17-week service use monitoring, (ii) employee online survey with measures of wellbeing, job stressfulness, presenteeism, turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and work engagement, as well as barriers and facilitators to accessing the Wellbeing Centres. Over 17 weeks, 14,934 facility visits were recorded across two sites (peak attendance in single week n = 2605). Facilities were highly valued, but the service model was resource intensive with 134 wellbeing buddies supporting the centres in pairs. 819 hospital employees completed an online survey (88% female; 37.7% working in COVID-19 high risk areas; 52.4% frontline workers; 55.2% had accessed a wellbeing centre). There was moderate-to-high job stress (62.9%), low wellbeing (26.1%), presenteeism (68%), and intentions to leave (31.6%). Wellbeing was higher in those that accessed a wellbeing centre. Work engagement and job satisfaction were high. Healthcare organisations are urged to mobilise access to high-quality rest spaces and psychological first aid, but this should be localised and diversified. Strategies to address presenteeism and staff retention should be prioritised, and the high dedication of healthcare workers should be recognised.
Highlights
Attendance at Site 1 and Site 2 is shown in Figure 1, visitor patterns were broadly comparable between sites and so attendance figures are reported for the wellbeing centres as a whole
* Significant at the 0.05 alpha level; ** Significant at the 0.01 alpha level; *** Significant at the 0.001 alpha level. + In order to conduct a valid chi square test, groups with small sample sizes were merged: student, volunteer and other in ‘work status’ group, ancillary/maintenance, ambulance and trust grade/clinical fellow in ‘occupational group’, and non-binary/gender fluid and prefer to not disclose in ‘gender group’. This is the first study to evaluate the usage and impact of supported wellbeing centres implemented to mitigate the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers
The centres were accessed by employees from diverse occupational groups, the highest users were frontline workers who were the most prevalent occupational groups who self-defined as working in COVID-19 high risk areas, and lowest users were those in office-based jobs and manual workers
Summary
It is well accepted that working in healthcare can be emotionally and physically demanding. The health and wellbeing of healthcare workers is associated with patient safety and experience, staff retention, and economic burden to the NHS from sickness absence [1]. NHS trusts invest routinely in staff health and wellbeing, and this reaps benefits in terms of improvements in health behaviours, reductions in sickness absence, and improvements in job. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 9401; doi:10.3390/ijerph17249401 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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