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Public health consultant, Jill Harland tells us about a new interactive data tool that can help us support staff and identify and address health issues affecting our workforce 

Our staff do a great job of looking after hundreds of people every single day and so it’s important that we do everything we can to respond to their needs and look after them too.

With over 10,000 people working in Northumbria we know that there will be lots of factors that will affect their health in many different ways.

With this in mind, we included a range of questions about health and wellbeing in our Spring staff survey and we were delighted to receive 3500 responses.

The results were then combined with other information we collect about staff to help build a new interactive data tool which collects all this information in one place to help build a picture of the health and wellbeing of everyone that works at Northumbria. It can help us look at any possible health issues that could occur based on things such as age, location, job role and so on.

It will also help us to understand how different staff may have different health experiences and how we can look at ways to improve that.

For example, we have used the tool already to help us identify staff groups who may be more at risk of musculoskeletal issues.  This has helped us to agree a range of actions which focus on what we know can make a difference.

We hope that this will help people get the support they needed quickly, before it has a negative impact on their overall wellbeing, their life and their ability to do their job. It will also hopefully reduce the chances of the issues having a knock-on effect on other areas of their health such as their mental wellbeing.

It really is a great tool and I’d like to thank everyone that has been involved, from those who took the time to respond to the survey to those who used the data to develop it. It will make a huge difference and help us to plan the support and interventions we put in place, based on the needs of our staff.

If you would like to see the new tool, learn more or have any ideas you’d like to share, please get in touch.

For more information on the interactive data tool, please click here.