A new NHS framework promoting health and wellbeing in healthcare staff was launched mid-May.

The investment of time and resource to write this report is to be celebrated. The framework emphasises the importance of NHS staff wellbeing and gives some concrete ideas for improving working conditions and individual skills to cope with difficult work. These have the potential to be helpful.

However, the report ignores one of the key reasons why this document is needed in the first place: funding constraints.

The NHS is losing staff and the staff it has are under huge pressure, largely due to the mismatch between the funding available to the NHS and the funding needed. The ongoing increased need for healthcare services is well-documented although there is less coverage of how the increasing need is likely linked to the chronic and ongoing cuts to social care and early intervention healthcare.

This framework for helping staff wellbeing highlights some fantastic services where things are working well, including ones with teams dedicated to staff wellbeing and training programmes in place which try to tap into key staff values. In these services there is clear use of staff time and resource fir these purposes. This is as a result of local decisions to prioritise staff wellbeing. The framework itself lacks any ring-fenced funding attached to its suggestions so it relies on already overstretched services choosing to follow its recommendations.

When there is not enough to go around for patients, it is really hard for staff to feel comfortable with using resources for staff wellbeing, even though research has shown associations between staff engagement and better patient experience, as well as reduced staff sickness.

These links between staff and patient wellbeing are important, as are the financial savings which the framework highlights, but staff wellbeing is also important for its own sake. Working in a caring profession is hugely rewarding and also hugely challenging. Occupational risks include compassion fatigue, secondary trauma and burnout. The divide of patient and staff wellbeing is helpful for research into how staff engagement and wellbeing can affect the experience of people using services, but it risks suggesting that these are two separate groups of people who will never overlap. In reality most NHS staff are also NHS patients at some point. All people need health services sometimes, for both mental and physical health problems.

This is a human need, and thinking about how work affects us all is also a human dilemma to consider. The boundary between our professional and personal selves is not always a clear one. It moves, it changes, sometimes it feels more permeable than others. The more we can think of both patients and staff as human beings with broadly similar needs for good care, good communication and realistic expectations, the more successful I think we will be at looking after everyone. The framework is a helpful tool, but to truly champion wellbeing in healthcare services, for everyone involved, takes ring-fenced time and money to show that wellbeing for all is important.