Our spaces for doing

Violence and reduction

Our data about the experiences of colleagues tells us how important prioritising staff safety and reducing, preventing, and responding to violence and aggression towards colleagues is for us. We have undertaken a stock take of where we are currently at, utilizing NHS England’s updated Violence Prevention and Reduction Standard and associated self-assessment for this, proactively exploring our data regarding equality groups. We have developed a new standalone strategy for LSCFT and workplan, which will be signed off by the Board of Directors in September. This work is sponsored by Oliver Soriano, Chief Nursing Officer and Rob Cragg, Chief People Officer with a working group to oversee implementation of the strategy and workplan delivery.

We are working on a compact we can share with colleagues when we launch to help everyone understand what will be different as we deliver on this programme of work. This will include:

• Clarity about our commitment to tackling the root causes of violence and aggression.
• Clarity about and development of our support post incidents for all colleagues impacted.
• Clarity about our approach to zero tolerance to racism and other forms of abuse and discrimination, and our follow up to incidents with patients/service users.
• Prioritising prevention, early intervention, and partnership working
• Acknowledgement of the harm violence and aggression has, including parity of harm between psychological and physical harm associated with violence and aggression incidents.
• Understanding more deeply our data relating to incidents to learn from and respond to themes as they emerge.
• Developing our training and resources to help colleagues to prevent, reduce and respond to incidents meaningfully.

Bank experience

One of our priority areas of focus is improving the experience of our bank colleagues. The bank national staff survey has enabled us to understand more about what it is like for colleagues who choose to work with us in this way and we have identified a range of improvements to make including related to responding to disproportionate levels of discrimination, variation in experience across the Trust and how we recognise and show our value to this important group in our overall workforce. Our bank experience improvement programme is jointly led by our deputy chief nurse and deputy chief people officer/director of organisational development and inclusion and brings together corporate teams and locality network leadership in the delivery of a range of improvements including broadening our supervision offer for bank workers, developing our onboarding approach, refining our HR policy and process, recognition schemes such as colleague of the month including bank workers, promotion of speaking up processes and our zero tolerance to racism programme and local listening to respond at ward or department level to improve.

Workplace sexual safety group

The Trust is committed to keeping colleagues safe and to ensure that they feel supported at work. Whilst legislation and professional standards are already in place, these do not always prevent issues or incidents from occurring. The organisation has signed up to the NHS Sexual Safety Charter and we are committed to a zero tolerance approach to tackle unwanted, inappropriate and harmful sexual behaviour in the workplace. The Trust included unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature from patients, relatives, or the public in the last staff survey. In addition, there was a further question in relation to staff experiencing unwanted behaviour of sexual nature from colleagues.

The Trust have an established working group in place to ensure that reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of our employees, covered in the amended Equality Act are taken and that the 10 principles of the Sexual Safety Charter are in place and embedded into the organisation.

Achievements 

• The Trust has implemented a sexual safety toolkit for staff which is for teams working and training in healthcare to provide them with the information needed to support conversations in relation to sexual safety of staff in the workplace. The toolkit highlights support and reporting mechanisms for colleagues that have experienced sexual misconduct in the workplace. The Trust encourages staff to report this via IRiS (incident reporting system) and for colleagues to speak to their manager. The toolkit highlights alternative mechanisms for support or reporting such as human resources, Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) guardians, sexual safety advocates, trade unions, and the Temporary Staffing Team. In addition, the toolkit provides bystander interventions and advice for line managers around approaching a conversation, confidentiality and the relevant policies when supporting a colleague around a disclosure of sexual misconduct.
• NHS England e-learn: understanding sexual misconduct in the workplace training has been mandated for all colleagues and compliance currently stands at 80%.
• Sexual Misconduct in the Workplace Policy developed and published in June 2025.
• One off sexual safety event in March 2024 held to raise awareness of sexual harassment and violence.
• Bespoke training day held in May 2025 for sexual safety advocates, HR colleagues, diversity and inclusion colleagues, staff side and other key holders. The training covered sexual harassment and violence and the impact, the law (Equality Act) and Sexual Misconduct Policy, barriers to workplace disclosure, bystander interventions, trauma informed approach to unwanted behaviour, our sexual safety toolkit, the Trust’s reporting structure, the role of the sexual safety advocate, supervision and, health and wellbeing support (external and internal).
• Communication strategy developed including screensavers and all colleague updates to launch the Sexual Misconduct Policy and posters ordered for bathroom doors across the Trust.
• Recruitment of 20 sexual safety advocates across - this new role has been introduced as an additional point of contact for employees. Advocates have attended specialist training to enable them to have confidential wellbeing conversations, understand the Trust’s reporting structure and signposting to internal and external support.
• Sexual incidents from patients will be reported as on IRiS as an incident. Allegations of sexual misconduct can be reported via HR, line management, FTSU processes and under a newly developed allegation tab on IRiS which will be sent to the HR inbox only for review and follow up.