Asked by: Lord Godson (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what interventions they are undertaking to reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal conditions among NHS staff.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Employers across the National Health Service have their own arrangements in place in line with their duty of care for supporting their staff, including occupational health provision, employee support programmes, and board level scrutiny through health and wellbeing guardians.
The 10-Year Health Plan committed to the roll out of Staff Treatment Hubs, to provide a high-quality, wellbeing and occupational health service for all NHS staff, including musculoskeletal conditions, one of the main causes of sickness absence in the NHS. Work is underway to develop implementation plans for the Staff Treatments Hubs.
We are also working with Nuffield Health to support NHS staff to access their Joint Pain Programme. The programme is aimed at those staff who are off work due to chronic joint pain or struggling with pain whilst at work and will create up to 4,000 free places annually.
Asked by: Lord Godson (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the accuracy, consistency, and transparency of sickness absence reporting within the NHS.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England, previously NHS Digital, has been producing and publishing monthly data on sickness absence rates in the National Health Service in the form of official statistics, since September 2009. These data are sourced from the NHS’ payroll and human resources system, the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). As with all official statistics we are always looking for ways to improve both the utility and presentation of these statistics.
NHS England makes every effort to cleanse and improve the utility of the data it downloads from ESR. However, as with all data reported from ESR, the quality of the data NHS England subsequently publishes ultimately lies with the organisations that populate it. The latest publication of sickness absence data for England can be found on the NHS.UK website.
In preparation for the development of the Future NHS Workforce Solution (Future Solution), the successor to the ESR, the human resources system for the NHS, a project is underway to review and consider enhancements to the way in which sickness absence is coded, to explore the feasibility of streamlining and standardising the way in which sickness absence is managed and recorded in ESR and the Future Solution. This project will take place aligned to the Future Solution development timescales with the intention of concluding during quarter three of next financial year.
The sickness absence reporting from ESR has always been used to offer a strategic view of absence in the workforce and is not intended to be used to identify short term trends or be used for operational reasons at a trust level. For example, it could not be used to identify trends in absence as they were happening during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional data on showing daily sickness absence numbers is published as part of the Urgent and Emergency Care Daily Situation Reports, which are available on the NHS.UK website