NHS Staff Survey
Published by NHS England (Survey Coordination Centre) · Official source
Update schedule
- Annual. The survey is fielded in the autumn and the results are published the following spring (around March).
Level of detail
- NHS trust, England only
What we show
- The share of staff who agreed that, if a friend or relative needed treatment, they would be happy with the standard of care provided by their organisation — the headline workforce-confidence measure (survey question 25d)
- The share of staff who agreed they would recommend their organisation as a place to work (question 25c)
- The Staff Engagement theme score, out of 10 — NHS England's summary index of how motivated, involved and able to contribute staff feel
- The prior year's 'happy with care' figure, shown as a factual year-on-year change, and the median across all English trusts as a neutral comparator
Caveats
- The NHS Staff Survey records the views of staff who chose to respond — a measure of workforce culture, morale and staff confidence, NOT a direct measure of clinical outcomes or patient safety.
- It is a voluntary, self-selected survey: response rates vary a great deal between trusts, so a figure from a trust with a low response rate carries less weight than the same figure from one with a high response rate.
- There is NO official NHS target or pass mark for these subjective staff measures. We never grade them green/amber, show a badge, or rank trusts on them anywhere on the site — the median across English trusts is shown only as context, not as a standard to pass or fail.
- Reported per trust — the same figures apply to every hospital the trust runs, always labelled 'Trust-wide'.
- England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate staff surveys on a different basis, so these figures are never compared across nations.
- We read the five trust-type benchmark sheets (acute and acute community, acute specialist, mental health / learning disability / community, community, and ambulance trusts); the survey also covers other organisation types and a large detailed question set we do not surface.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.