Exclusive: NHS Workforce's Clare Chapman believes engaged staff are the key to increased productivity and improved quality

A number of studies in the NHS and the private sector are starting to show that staff engagement is associated with good quality of care and higher patient satisfaction.

At the same time, the NHS is facing its biggest challenge yet - after 10 years of investment it must now prepare itself to deliver up to £20 billion of efficiency savings between 2011and 2014.

To deliver these savings and ensure high quality for all in a tighter financial climate requires staff to innovate to increase productivity while improving quality. Engaged staff are the key.

But this is not just about traditional levels of staff engagement as advocated in the private sector. The NHS does not just need engagement from staff, it needs their full involvement.

We need leaders, staff and patients to work in a new way - to take deeper ownership of quality.

Research by McKinsey demonstrates that values are key to motivation. There is a compelling culture in the NHS but what was missing was a common set of values that spanned the entire service and that's why we wrote the NHS Constitution that will become law later this year.   

Key to the NHS values are the four pledges to staff - to provide them with rewarding jobs, training and development, health and wellbeing - and engagement and involvement in decisions that affect them and the services they provide.

It states that ‘all staff will be empowered to put forward ways to deliver better and safer services for patients and their families'. And that's what we will achieve.

How? We have extensive information about the motivation of NHS staff from our survey of nearly 200,000 staff, public and patients undertaken before the NHS Constitution was set up. We know staff are fulfilled by their jobs and want to improve patient care but feel the system at times works against them providing the high quality care they aspire to give.

We have initiated a renewed focus on leadership in the NHS to increase leadership capacity and capability to ensure staff are freed up to innovate, to work in the interest of their patients at all times, and no longer feel hampered by the system. 

We have established the Boorman review to analyse the health and wellbeing of NHS staff and recommend improvements and we are also developing the staff survey to ensure we get feedback on staff engagement levels.

We are investing in further research to help us understand the relationship between engagement in the NHS and a range of staff management factors as well as a study led by the Work Foundation to explore the scope for elaborating roles and responsibilities for HR and line management.

Through the constitution and the NHS values that bind all health service staff together and the renewed focus on outstanding leadership throughout the NHS, we will achieve higher levels of staff engagement, inspire innovation, increase productivity and improve care.

Clare Chapman, is director general for the NHS Workforce and, as recommended in the MacLeod Review, will join a sponsor group later this year along with senior HR professionals including Cary Cooper, professor at Lancaster University Management School, Jackie Orme, chief executive of the CIPD, and Justin King, CEO of Sainsbury's, to discuss methods of boosting staff engagement

Find out more about the MacLeod Review