Throughout this week HSJ, in association with NHS Employers, has been celebrating the best places to work in the health service in 2014. Here we reveal the 100 best acute trusts, community trusts, clinical commissioning groups and mental health trusts to work for in the English NHS

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NHS Employers is delighted to support this year’s Best Places to Work initiative.

Every day we work with NHS organisations in England to provide leaders and managers with practical, topical advice and information on issues ranging from pay and pensions to staff health and wellbeing. Our daily contacts with employers help us understand the importance of high levels of staff engagement and staff experience and the link this has to quality patient care.

‘Staff engagement, talent, culture change and vision are all words that are being used more and more when we talk about being a good employer’

Continuing to make the NHS a good place to work and retain current staff and attract new ones is always a challenge. Making our organisations a Best Place to Work is one aspect of meeting this challenge.

So, what’s the difference between good and great? What difference does it make to be recognised as one of the best places to work? A great employer has 100 per cent commitment from its leaders. They engage their staff, listen to innovative ideas and involve their people in the challenges and improvements that the organisation faces.

The NHS staff survey and initiatives such as Best Places to Work provide leaders with information they can use to identify where improvements need to be made. A great employer will proactively use data from the staff survey and engage with their workforce and patients to make improvements.

Staff engagement, talent, culture change and vision are all words that are being used more and more when we talk about being a good employer. These words need to be put into action. We hope that the examples of action set out in this year’s list will help you do this.

Gill Bellord is director of employment relations and reward at NHS Employers.

HSJ Best Places to Work 2014

Click on the organisation name to find out why they are on the list. Organisations are listed alphabetically.

Top 10 best places to work

Acute trusts

Community trusts

Mental health trusts

Clinical commissioning groups

Best Places to Work 2014 – how we identified them

HSJ’s Best Places to Work is an annual celebration of the UK’s elite public sector healthcare employers. These organisations have proven that they know what it takes to create environments where people love to come to work. Identifying and recognising these outstanding workplaces is a joint effort of HSJ and Best Companies Group. BCG is an independent workplace research firm specialising in identifying and recognising great places to work throughout the US, Canada and the UK.

Each year, all healthcare trusts are required to conduct an employee engagement and satisfaction survey. This is compiled into reports about trusts that are also made public by the NHS and the Picker Institute at www.nhsstaffsurveys.com.

Best Companies Group was able to use this information to analyse the organisations, determine who was in the top 100, and to create benchmark reports used by HSJ.

More specifically, each trust’s data was categorised into seven different core focus areas to determine how good they were in each of the areas. The core focus areas are:

  • Leadership and planning
  • Corporate culture and communications
  • Role satisfaction
  • Work environment
  • Relationship with supervisor
  • Training and development
  • Employee engagement and employee satisfaction

Once that stage of the analysis was complete, BCG was able to rank the trusts and identify which were in the top 100.

Each trust also had the opportunity to complete an employer questionnaire, conducted by BCG.

The information gathered by this survey was used by HSJ to complete organisational profiles and to dig deeper into what make a great place to work. The employer questionnaire was not used in the determination of the top 100.

BCG’s workplace assessment experts determined who was good enough to make the list and where they ranked.

The list presented here is ordered alphabetically, by organisation type, but the overall top 10 organisations have been higlighted.

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