People and Organisational Development Strategy

It is our mission to deliver outstanding care, every day and our ambition that we have a sustainable and fulfilled diverse workforce, empowered to deliver our mission. Our workforce is crucial to help us in delivering our priorities as set out in the Trust Strategy for 2020-2025.

Delivering these priorities will not only require us to build on what is great about working at Epsom and St Helier University Hospital NHS Trust (ESTH) but will require a fresh look at our workforce models to ensure the culture, values and behaviour standards of the Trust are fit for purpose and enable us to attract, develop and retain our most valuable resource – our people.

As we move forward with our refreshed Trust Strategy, it is an opportune time to review and update the workforce priorities to enable us to deliver these aims and as such we have reviewed our People and Organisational Development Strategy 2021-2025.

The 2021-2025 strategy is built on our vision, with four supporting pillars, namely: providing outstanding care everyday by attracting, developing and retaining exceptional people whilst nurturing an environment of wellbeing and respect.

The People Strategy sets out our people priorities until 2025, setting out the ambitions for the future of our workforce, embracing the opportunities that Building Your Future Hospitals (BYFH) will bring and recognising the challenges that we faced during 2020 and early 2021 as we responded to COVID-19.

We recognises that the success of our organisation is achieved through our workforce. It is the commitment, hard work, diversity, capabilities and compassion in our people that will ensure outstanding care, every day.

In designing the strategic approach to our people, we look to serving the diverse needs of our local communities as well as reducing health inequalities, as we meet our people objectives. As a model employer, and to fulfil the organisation’s anchor vision, we embrace opportunities to impact our community’s health beyond our role as a provider of treatment and care.

In 2020 the NHS People Plan was launched and sets out what the NHS people can expect from their organisations and from each other.

The four pillars of our People Strategy have been informed by the NHS People Plan, post-COVID learning as well the Trust Mission. They are formed against a back drop of our digital change agenda as well as our new build hospital, both of which are embedded in the work that will be undertaken as we progress to meeting our people objectives.

This People strategy has been informed by national and regional activity and through consultation with key internal and external stakeholders. Alongside this strategy is a detailed work plan written with input from our Staff Side colleagues (Annex 1). It sets out the actions required to implement the requirements of this strategy and how we will track delivery and improvement. The work plan will be refreshed on an annual basis.