NHS Workforce Statistics User Engagement Strategy 2026-2029
What is user engagement?
The Government Analysis Function’s User Engagement Strategy for Statistics describes user engagement as being about building sustainable relationships and feedback loops between statistics producers, users and potential users of statistics and other relevant stakeholders.
It can be collaborative both within and between organisations and themes and strives to make statistics accessible to a wider range of potential users.
Engagement can take many different forms and works best when it has multiple coordinated strands and is tailored to the audience.
What we want to achieve
NES is committed to producing Official statistics that meet our users’ needs in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics, the Regulatory Guidance for User Engagement and the Government Analysis Function’s User Engagement Strategy for Statistics.
NES aims to promote a flexible, proactive and proportionate approach to communicating and engaging with current and potential users of statistics to improve our products and services.
Engagement should be viewed as an essential part of the production of all NES’s Official statistical outputs, both new outputs and ‘mature’ publications.
How we will achieve this
The Government Analysis Function’s User Engagement Strategy for Statistics sets out three goals to address the barriers to effective user engagement.
Collaboration
We will identify and join up our existing user engagement initiatives, particularly those targeting users outside the NHS and government to ensure that all activities are aligned with this strategy.
We will set up an advisory group with representatives from our users to help us guide and prioritise improvements and developments. This group will meet twice a year, with outputs published on our website.
We will produce a newsletter to inform our users of the latest updates to our official statistical publications and other work that NES is undertaking.
We will create user personas to ensure our statistics are suitable for all our users. User personas describe different types of user in terms of their background, their data requirements and their preferences for interacting with our data.
We will continue to work with other official statistics producers to understand what statistics can be meaningfully compared across the UK nations. We will communicate potential differences in a transparent way.
Capability
We need to have the right skill set to understand our audience so we can engage with the right people in the right way to ensure our statistics are relevant and have impact.
We will ensure that our communications meet the needs of wider audiences by using different channels to engage with all our users and by seeking continuous feedback on our outputs and communications.
We will work closer with the User Experience team within NES to build capability within the Data Group team and ensure that the statistics we produce meet all our users’ needs and have effective feedback loops.
Culture
We will continue to work with other providers of statistics within Scotland, such as Public Health Scotland, and collaborate with the UK Health Workforce Statistics group to learn and share best practice.
We will be transparent about the methods we use to produce our data through our recently developed technical reports.
We will be transparent about any unscheduled corrections or revisions we make to our published statistical products through our Data Quality Reports.
We will publish the details of any pre-release access to official statistics alongside our publications.