NHS staff survey

[Gettingbysomehow]

Can I be absolutely sure this is anonymous as we are all afraid of our boss.

This is an interesting Q - I mean, it really should be, and it would be a massive story if it wasn't. I've always filled it in as if it was.

I always fudge the answers for the age and ethnic minority questions

Yes I've done that because that would be an immediate clue.

I wouldn't bother nothing will change anyway. It's just a box ticking exercise.

I always hate how they say it is anonymous then collect 'department' 'age range' 'sex' data - makes it very clear who said what in our work place

I don't think the results can be seen like that by managers tho. I.e. they can't see that the white British mid 30s female said xyz or whatever. The results are viewed in quite an aggregate form.

@MakingPlans2025 - that's good to know, thank you.

I work in the NHS, my colleague has never filled one in & often gets an email asking for it to be completed! So no, it appears there not anonymous.

I spend fucking hours going to long, boring meetings discussing the results of these bloody surveys and they’re absolutely, completely, anonymous.

You don’t get results for any dept of less than 10 people and smaller depts are all lumped together in groupings.

The company that runs the survey knows if an individual has not completed and sends a reminder but we have no idea who has or has not completed only % completion rate for a department.

The meetings and resulting action plans would be more interesting and more meaningful if you had a clue who had said what but unless you include some really personalised comments your manager won’t have a clue what you’ve said.

There is always an anonymity threshold so that they can't drill down below a certain figure, so you might be the only female Asian nurse in your department for example but they won't be able to drill down too far. Lets say the anonymity threshold is 5- they might be able to breakdown the results by male and female nurses or see results by ethnicity for groups of more than 5 but they can't identify you

Your boss will never see….that said, I worked in the nhs for years and never filled one in

Everyone gets emailed reminding them to complete it whether they have completed it or not.

I'm a nurse manager and the ones we use are completely confidential. We get a score based on employees response but nothing identifiable.

Yes and no. It is compiled at a department and a team level. If you only have ten people in your team, it's pretty obvious who has said what.

That’s why you don’t get small team reports. I have teams of 30+ and they’re lumped together under a whole department umbrella.

I don't know if it's the case for ALL NHS trusts, but I've worked with several who use an external provider to carry out their surveys and the external provider can send reminders only to the people who haven't completed their surveys but the trust have no way of knowing who has or hasn't and the external provider doesn't tie someone's identity to their responses. Your friend can probably relax