We need to listen to what NHS staff are telling us

Health correspondent Shaun Lintern argues the results of the NHS staff survey should be a wake-up call for health service bosses

More than half of NHS workers do extra unpaid hours on a weekly basis (Shutterstock/PongMoji)

Surveys, as a general rule, are a fairly poor way of understanding what a large number of people think about things. Most tend to draw on a small samples of self-selecting respondents which can skew results in a variety of directions and deny you meaningful intelligence you can act on.

But the annual NHS staff survey is different. It is the largest workforce survey in the world and has been carried out every year since 2003. The number of staff responding to the survey has now reached 569,000 – almost 44 per cent of the 1.3 million staff employed in the health service.

So what they say is meaningful, it does give an indication of what life is really like for doctors, nurses and other staff working on the frontline. It tells us how the pressures are impacting on them and their view of risks and concerns.