Nurse leaders call for ‘equitable’ support for bank staff
Bank nurses who have suffered physical and sexual violence at work must be offered the same support as their substantive colleagues, a conference has heard.
Discussions about how organisations can empower bank staff to speak up took place at the NHS Confederation Expo, being held in Manchester this week.
“When you go to work as a bank member of staff, the way you’re treated…has to be equitable”
Rosa Waddingham
It comes as the first ever NHS Staff Survey for bank workers, published last month, revealed that nursing staff working on the bank were even more likely than their substantive colleagues to face sexual harassment in the workplace.
Among registered nurses and midwives on the bank, 13% said they had faced unwanted sexual behaviour from patients and other members of the public, compared with 11% of substantive nurses and midwives.
Meanwhile, the survey found that bank staff were also more likely to face physical violence at work compared to their substantive colleagues, with nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants the professoinal groups experiencing the most abuse.
Nursing Times put these findings to the panel at NHS Confederation Expo and asked them what can be done across NHS organisations to ensure that bank staff can be empowered to speak up when faced with violence and discrimination at work.
Rosa Waddingham, chief nurse at Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board, told Nursing Times that it related to a wider issue of inequity between bank and substantive staff.
“When you go to work as a bank member of staff, the way you’re treated both while working and when you report something after something happens, has to be equitable,” she said.
“It is beholden on us as organisations that use [these] staff, to make sure that there is that equity, not only of experience but of support, and the ability to access somebody who’s going to listen to you.”
Ms Waddingham also called for better education for bank staff so that when they go into any ward environment they are “trained and aware” on how to raise concerns.
“We know that’s variable, [but] some organisations have great training wraparound packages for their staff,” she explained.
“I think we need equity for bank staff, and increasing of the relationship [between organisations and their bank workers] into being the norm…can only help with the distressing findings that we read about in that survey.”
This was echoed by Martin Griffiths, clinical director for violence reduction at NHS England, who said the NHS Staff Survey of bank staff was a “really useful piece of information albeit still distressing”.
He linked the increased incidents of sexual and physical violence to the fact that many bank staff were placed “in the most difficult clinical areas”, and that some substantive staff did not see bank workers as being a proper part of the wider team.
“For me it’s about looking at the data around it [and] asking our bank staff what happened and how it happened,” he said.
“It’s really about having a whole system around it, recognising there’s a challenge there for us all.”
Mr Griffiths described bank staff as “the canary in the coal mine” and suggested that their experience was likely reflective of the wider issues facing the NHS workforce.
It comes as a Nursing Times investigation, published this week, found that reports of racism towards staff have increased yearly since 2017.
The investigation supported anecdotal evidence by nurses that the problem of racially motivated violence and abuse at work was getting worse, rather than better.
