This information pack is designed to brief our stakeholders on the new Growing Occupational Health (OH) programme. 

Key messages:

• We are launching the Growing Occupational Health programme to grow NHS delivered OH services and support our NHS OH people as strategic, integrated, and proactive organisational partners.
• In collaboration with Dr Steve Boorman, Dr Shriti Pattani and key strategic partners including the NHS Health at Work Network, FOM, SOM, NHS Employers and SPF members, NHS England and NHS Improvement have begun to develop the vision for the Growing OH programme.
• To help make this vision a reality, we would like to invite a variety of stakeholders to get involved in the co-design and collaboration via our engagement events and to have your say via our online survey. 

Find out more at:

https://www.nhshealthatwork.co.uk/growingoh.asp

Introducing ‘Growing OH’

The vision for this exciting new programme of work is to support the health and wellbeing of our NHS people by growing NHS delivered OH services and our NHS OH people as strategic, integrated and proactive organisational partners. The programme is underpinned by various service improvement drivers, and the principles of collaboration and co-design by working with our OH community to grow the service, and our OH people together. 

Under the leadership of Dr Steve Boorman and with support from the NHS Health at Work Network, Faculty of Occupational Medicine, Society of Occupational Medicine, Council for Work and Health, NHS Health and Wellbeing Expert Advisory Board, and Social Partnership Forum members, NHS England and Improvement have co-designed a strategic programme of work to support the vision. 

We recognise that our OH people have gone above and beyond during the pandemic, and we believe that now is the time to increase support our NHS OH services to become more strategic, integrated, and proactive partners. 

Our intention is to work with our OH stakeholders to grow the vision in a collaborative way and evolve the programme over time.

Launching the programme and working together to evolve the programme

The Growing OH programme appreciates that the capacity of OH services are stretched due to vital efforts supporting the pandemic, but also recognises the finite window that we have to support positive change. With this in mind, we aim to start small, with the intention of learning and growing together over time.  

Programme activity for 2021-22 is designed to begin our journey of growing our OH people and OH services, with a large amount of engagement, co-design and collaborative work to evaluate and build on best practice. This work will inform future ‘blueprints’ for potential service delivery models, and subsequently the development of a longer-term programme of work and investment plan. 

Get involved in shaping the vision

We want to start this exciting programme of work by building energy and momentum with our NHS OH community and wider stakeholders in the true spirit of co-design. Whilst the wider programme offers are developed, here’s what is available for you to get involved with: 

1.     Have your say at initial engagement events: We want to start with a series of engagement events open to our OH stakeholders to share your feedback on the vision and drivers to further shape our collaborative programme of work.  

Book here: https://www.events.england.nhs.uk/growing-occupational-health-events

2.     Share your views on our online survey: In addition to our engagement events we have developed a short survey for you to share your ideas and help shape the future of how occupational health services are received and delivered.

Find out more and fill out the survey here

What’s next?

We will integrate feedback from our engagement events and progress the wider programme ambitions and deliverables by collaboratively working with you as our OH community to deliver upon the vision for the programme. We will also be releasing development offers to grow our OH people, including access to a bespoke OH leadership development programme.

We will keep our website updated with more information as the programme processes: Find out more at: https://www.nhshealthatwork.co.uk/growingoh.asp

If you’d like to share a key piece of work, best practice, or learning that others can benefit from, please share this with our team at: england.growingOH@nhs.net