Date published: 24 April 2025
This is a short video summary of some of our People Promise work carried out with local primary care teams across the NHS area of North Cumbria.
Below is a transcript from this summary video.
The People Promise is a national initiative that seeks to improve staff experience of working in the NHS.
It's a promise we almost make to each other to work together, to improve the experience of working in the NHS for everyone.
The themes and words that make up our People Promise have actually come from those who work in the NHS. People in different healthcare roles and organisations have made it clear what matters to them most and what would make the greatest difference in improving their experience in the workplace.
The Primary Care Services North Cumbria project was one of the first to sign up to the People Promise exemplar programme in cohort 2 - this is where Kirsty Jay enters, who became our People Promise Manager.
Kirsty said: "The ultimate aim of the programme is to retain our staff. We've got a lot of really good staff working across primary care, we don't want to lose them. So my role here is just to work with practices to embed some ideas, some projects into the practices to hopefully enhance staff's working experience."
Across the last year (2024 - 2025) Kirsty has been really busy working with practices in North Cumbria to implement the People Promise and some of the elements of it. Here's a brief summary of some of the achievements that were made over the course of the year.
- Wellbeing focus groups were run in conjunction with iCan.
- A piece of work to gain feedback and make improvements on protected learning time (PLT) for non-clinical staff took place.
- Information was highlighted to remind the benefits of the NHS Pension Scheme.
- Staff were given the opportunity to join a number of NHS England Engagement Sessions as part of building the NHS EDI Improvement Plan.
- Violence prevention and reduction - support packages were developed as it was clear that negative behaviour from patients was having an impact on staff, work experience and retention.
- A Freedom to Speak Up service has been implemented for practices with 22 of the 33 practices signing up to the initiative (the other practices already had arrangements in place). This provides staff with an independent and conflict free place to voice concerns.
- Civility, respect and teamwork workshops took place.
- Work Perks were highlighted to remind staff of benefits overlooked or often forgotten.
- As well as various other work and initiatives.
A big thank you to all practices and staff that took part.
Although the People Promise role is now coming to an end, practices should continue to carry out the learnings from the programme and although the name of the programme may change to something else in the future, the core concepts of what the People Promise stood for should continue to grow in organisations to better support staff wellbeing.
