Excellent care for our people

To deliver excellent care, we must look after our people by creating safe, supportive environments in which they can thrive and be healthy and happy at work. To do this, we will make sure every colleague has access to the support they need. We will tackle discrimination, promote civility, and equip our managers to lead with compassion. This work is essential to building a resilient, motivated workforce and will be led by three main commitments:

1. Building a culture of safety

We will do this by tackling harmful behaviours, promoting psychological safety, and embedding learning from incidents. We will review our safety and violence prevention programme with a focus on sexual misconduct, harassment, and discrimination. We will expand training in Civility Saves Lives, Active Bystander, and Human Factors to promote psychological safety. We will also continue to implement the Patient Safety Incident Framework (PSIRF) so all staff can confidently learn from near-misses and harms. And we will ensure managers are skilled at welcoming concerns and continue to promote our Freedom to Speak Up Guardians for confidential support.

2. Being better at the basics

We will do this by adopting the new national Staff Standards to be announced in 2026 to make sure our people have access to nutritious food, dedicated rest spaces, safe environments, and occupational health support. We will also prioritise accurate, fair pay and continue to expand financial wellbeing initiatives for staff.

3. Creating a healthy workforce

We will do this by supporting colleagues’ physical and mental wellbeing through a new Health and Wellbeing Plan. This will address health inequalities, improve access to psychological support, and promote physical activity. We will also ensure universal access to occupational health and employee support programmes and will continue to partner with charities to enhance staff wellbeing offers for our people.

Improvement is driven by the people closest to the work. Our staff have the insight, creativity and motivation to make meaningful changes – but they need the right support and environment to do so. The Big Conversation highlighted the need for better decision-making, clearer structures, and more opportunities for staff to shape services. We recognise that and will make three important commitments to create a culture of curiosity, collaboration and continuous learning that will unlock the full potential of our workforce and deliver better care for our patients:

1. Strengthening our culture of continuous improvement

We will do this by fostering the psychological safety our people need to feel confident trying new things and challenging the status quo. We will create more opportunities for colleagues from across the Trust to come together and problem-solve through rapid improvement events and innovation labs. And we will pilot new approaches to recognising and rewarding ideas that lead to measurable improvements for our patients or staff.

2. Empowering our teams

We will do this by adopting NHS Impact principles as our Trust-wide improvement methodology to help staff use evidence and creativity to drive meaningful change. We will also strengthen training to support local innovation and celebrate successful change.

3. Equipping our people to make change happen

We will do this by making sure our staff have the tools and resources they need to drive improvement. We will establish a Clinical Transformation Programme Board to lead strategic change, while supporting local leadership teams with development budgets for site-level improvements. We will align our improvement and organisational development functions and promote learning from successful service transformations, using improvement summits to tackle cross-cutting challenges.

We are proud to be a major university teaching trust, bridging academic knowledge and clinical practice to benefit both patients and learners. With our partners, we train more than 2,000 student and trainee doctors and nurses each year.

Learning is central to our goal of delivering excellent care. We are uniquely positioned to offer high-quality education and development across all roles and career stages. By embedding a culture of continuous learning, we will attract and retain talent, improve care quality, and help our staff reach their full potential. Over the five years ahead, we will commit to:

1. Providing quality education and training

We will do this by launching a new Integrated Education Plan from 2026, informed by staff feedback and best practice. This plan will develop a skilled and sustainable workforce through excellent education and training for all. We will improve support for educators, provide high-quality learning environments tailored to diverse needs, and develop excellence in patient safety education. The plan will also promote digital confidence to support new ways of working and strengthen partnerships to improve our educational expertise and capabilities.

2. Developing inclusive, high-performing leaders

We will do this by introducing a new multi-professional leadership development programme for all professional groups; launching new core training for managers and a ‘manager’s passport’ to ensure consistency in standards and expectations; and developing our community of leaders through summits and shared learning opportunities, with all our programmes designed to address imbalances in representation at senior levels.

3. Delivering effective plans for our workforce

We will do this by planning proactively, identifying future skill needs and the career paths required to attract and retain diverse talent. Each of our professional and corporate groups will create aligned workforce plans to support recruitment, retention, and development. We will develop a five-year Workforce Development Plan and publish aligned plans for each of our professions, starting with nursing, midwifery, and allied health professions.

Our people know our hospitals better than anyone. They are experts in their field and know what needs to change for us to be able to deliver the excellent care we want to see everywhere. To make the most of their skills and experience, we are committed to welcoming a wider diversity of perspectives and ideas to inform every decision we make, and to telling people what happened in response to what they said. We will take three important steps to make this happen:

1. Supporting our staff networks

We will improve staff experience and build community and belonging by growing and professionalising our staff networks. We will provide organisational support for their coordination and activity and create more opportunities for them to influence the future of the Trust. And we will work with our networks to co-create the frameworks we need to make this happen.

2. Hearing more diverse voices

We will do this by creating a new staff panel drawn from across the organisation and representing a diversity of roles, sites, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We will also build stronger relationships with trades unions to ensure their members’ perspectives are better understood and reflected in the decisions we take. Access to this wide range of views and lived experiences will make our planning and decision making more responsive to the needs of our people.

3. Championing speaking up

We will do this by making sure all colleagues know how and to whom they can speak up and be confident they can do so in confidence and safety. We will build on the great work of our independent Freedom to Speak Up Guardian by growing our network of local champions and peer support. And we will equip our leaders at all levels with the skills they need to be able to hear, respond to and act on concerns with compassion and respect