Primary Care Under Pressure: mapping the provision of staff wellbeing strategies and interventions for the primary care workforce in England

PI Title: Daniele Carrieri

Lead member: Exeter

The NHS needs motivated staff to provide the best care for patients. However, NHS staff experiences high levels of stress, anxiety, and other mental illnesses due to very challenging demands and pressurised work environments. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the situation, and it is unsurprising that the 2022 report by the UK Health and Social Care Committee states that: “The NHS and the social care sector are facing the greatest workforce crisis in their history”.
Primary care is particularly affected: demand has increased, waiting lists are growing, and staff are leaving the profession. The organisation of primary care is also rapidly changing with the introduction of integrated care services ICSs and integrated care boards ICBs, and the addition of new roles (e.g. dietitians, paramedics). It is key to strengthen the support for primary care to protect patient safety and staff wellbeing. However, it is unclear how staff wellbeing support is currently set up in primary care.

This project aims to map the current workplace wellbeing support for all clinical and non-clinical staff working the primary care in England. This will allow us to develop a future NIHR project aimed at improving how workplaces support primary care staff mental ill-health and wellbeing.
This project will last for nine months and will combine three concurrent activities:
1. Freedom of Information request to all integrated care boards (ICBs) overseeing the 42 integrated care systems (ICSs) in England, to understand the wellbeing support currently provided at the local level.
2. Analysis of existing relevant datasets and information sources to understand provision and gaps at local levels.

3. Engagement with key stakeholders (patient and public representation, primary care staff, and members of relevant organisations e.g. British Medical Association), to identify additional relevant data and understand support provision at multiple levels
We are a team of clinicians and academics who collaborated on several projects including research on healthcare workforce wellbeing and retention, with a strong focus on primary care. Our team ethos is to work with stakeholders to develop high quality and more impactful research. We have a long engagement with stakeholders that include patient and public representation, doctors, other healthcare professionals, and NHS managers. We have discussed this project idea with members of our stakeholders and will engage with stakeholders throughout the project (see activity 3).
We will communicate our results via reports and publication. We will use videos to make our work more user-friendly and accessible. We have done this in a previous project e.g. we asked patients why the health of their doctor is important to them (see short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNY9u4CcxwQ&t=1s).