Pandemic lessons: gauging how NHS staff work now

Sarah Miles, an associate director and Workplace Consultant advisory at Arcadis, and her colleague, Healthcare Advisory lead, Smriti Singh, discuss a recent project with an acute NHS Trust – including a survey of more than 7,000 staff there – to discover how the pandemic has changed perceptions of hospital workspace, and ‘how we can start to implement change, both in physical space, and also in cultural views of hospital roles’.

NHS estates have historically been underfunded, and we have known for years that the working environment for frontline staff is far from optimal. While the pandemic has been an incredibly difficult time, our work shows that the changes in working patterns that have been brought on by it have a real potential for improving working environments for all staff, including frontline personnel. Exactly how this is done will vary from hospital to hospital, but the best starting point is, of course, asking staff.

Within this article we describe how we worked through this issue with a Trust to discover exactly how the pandemic had changed perceptions of hospital workspace, and how we can start to implement change, both in physical space, and also in cultural views of hospital roles.