About the Survey
The NHS Staff Survey is one of the largest workforce surveys in the world and has been conducted every year since 2003.
Each autumn everyone who works in the NHS in England is invited to take part in the NHS Staff Survey. The survey offers a snapshot in time of how people experience their working lives, gathered at the same time each year. Its strength is in capturing a national picture alongside local detail, enabling a range of organisations to understand what it is like for staff across different parts of the NHS and work to make improvements.
The aggregated survey results are official statistics, providing a rich source of data that is used by a wide range of NHS organisations to inform understanding of staff experience locally, regionally and nationally. From individual NHS trusts in England and regional staff experience experts to national organisations and programmes such as Trust SMEs, NHS England, Regional / Integrated Care System Leads, Care Quality Commission, Staff Networks, LGBTQ+, Workforce Race Equality Standard, Workforce Disability Equality Standard, Freedom To Speak Up and National Guardians Office, Social Partnership Forum, Temporary Staff Team, Retention Team, Patient Safety, Equality and Health Inequalities Team, Staff Survey Leads and the Pay Review Body.
In 2021 the questions were aligned with the NHS People Promise to track progress against its ambition to make the NHS the workplace we all want it to be. In 2023 the NHS Staff Survey was extended to bank only workers and general practice staff in participating systems following successful pilots.
If you wish to find more information on the General Practice Staff Survey (GPSS), this can be found on NHS England’s Employee Experience and Engagement FutureNHS community. If you haven’t already signed up to access FutureNHS, you can do so with a health and care email address such as @nhs.net, @*.nhs.uk, or @phe.gov.uk. If you have a different email to these, you can request an invitation to join the FutureNHS platform through the new members’ page.
The Staff Survey Coordination Centre at Picker Institute Europe and the survey’s independent advisory group support NHS England with the implementation of the surveys.
