Our colleagues
Our People
At EEAST, we remain dedicated to being an exceptional place to work, volunteer and learn. We are on a cultural improvement journey to ensure our people work in an environment which allows them to grow, develop and ultimately thrive.
Supporting and developing our people is a key priority for EEAST. Our people services and strategy, and culture and education teams underwent significant transformation over the last 12 months. This ensured the right mechanisms were in place to empower and support our leaders, to lead with compassion and develop our people to adapt to, and embrace, new ways of delivering the right care to our patients.
We are creating an inclusive, engaging and progressive environment where the safety and wellbeing of our people, is at the heart of everything we do: to enable us to deliver the right care, to the right patient at the right time.
Our colleagues on the frontline, those in control rooms and those providing non-emergency services are the ‘face’ of EEAST. Supporting these colleagues are hundreds of others within our support services functions.
All our people, whether directly or indirectly, contribute to ensuring we provide the very best service for our patients.
We currently have 5,880 staff members. This includes:
- Ambulance Operations Centre (AOC) - 639
- 999 Emergency - 3,746
- Operational Support and Estates - 259
- Air and Special Operations - 165
- Support Services - 578
- Patient Transport Services - 493
These are aged:
- Less than 21 - 1%
- 21-30 - 27%
- 31-40 - 24%
- 41-50 - 22%
- 51-60 21%
- 61-70 - 5%
- 71 and over - 0%
Their genders are:
- Female - 53%
- Male 47%
Their ethnicity is:
- White - 83%
- BAME - 5%
- Not known - 12%
They are:
- Full time - 84%
- Part time - 16%
Turnover and retention
By decreasing staff turnover, through a structured plan supported by strategy, EEAST retained a healthy workforce with valued experience and skills, whilst reducing the spend on recruitment and private and agency staffing.
We recognised that changes would not be made overnight, and remained dedicated to implementing long-term plans that will be impactful and financially responsible. Retaining the valued skills and experience of our people is an EEAST key priority.
Turnover and retention continued to be a critical issue across the NHS. EEAST experienced high turnover rates throughout last year with long-term interventions only just beginning to make improvements.
In April 2022, EEAST reported a turnover rate of 12.98% which then spiked in September 2022 at 13.64%, in March 2023, this reduced to 11.99%.
EEAST engaged with national and regional workstreams such as the regional retention improvement plan, alongside implementation of internal interventions including a detailed EEAST retention improvement plan.
This work was supported by the launch of our people strategy and wellbeing plan.
We began to evidence improvement and recovery, attributed to local actions led by our people, including:
- recruitment and onboarding processes to improve candidate experience.
- career development pathways to support and develop our colleagues.
- HR Business Partner Team supported leaders to improve exit processes.
- data gathering processes provided us with the intelligence to adjust our organisational strategies.
Combined, these elements improved the overall ‘life cycle’ of our people to ensure a great experience from beginning to end of employment at EEAST.
Inclusivity
The percentage of BME colleagues employed by EEAST, and our people who declared their ethnicity, continued to increase throughout 2022/23. This increase was attributed to EEAST actively addressing underlying cultural issues relating to race discrimination, through our workforce race equality standard (WRES) plan, recent BME survey and our inclusivity plan.
These workstreams focused on both recruitment and supporting our existing colleagues. Increasing BME representation across EEAST improves the service we provide to our local communities and directly impacts upon patient care.
We focused on improving support offered to our people who declared a disability, including additional leadership training and awareness events.
Our executive and senior leadership teams played a prominent role in our awareness campaigns, which led to more colleagues recording their disabilities on our internal systems.
EEAST continued to support our people to feel comfortable to declare a disability with the confidence to know they will be treated fairly and equitably at EEAST.
Our recent BME survey was a key step change for EEAST during 2022, demonstrating our continued commitment to addressing the underlying cultural blockers to achieving true inclusivity. The results of this survey form our baseline, as well as a number of actions, which will feed into our three-year inclusivity plan.
We saw a shift in male to female headcount, females account for 53% of the total workforce.
Declared disability continued to rise spiking in October 2022 at 6.15%.
We published our gender pay gap report supported by an action plan to ensure that whilst the majority of our people are female, this ratio is also reflected within our leadership roles too.
Working closely with our equality networks, we continued to examine our supporting policies, procedures and management toolkits that better enable career progression for our colleagues.
EEAST used many different ways to recruit new colleagues, including a bus advertising campaign.