Northern Ireland to roll out staff well-being training across health service
pharmafile | September 8, 2026 | News story | | Northern Ireland Health and Social Care, staff well-being training
Thousands of line managers across Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care (HSC) system are to receive new training designed to improve staff well-being and address stress-related sickness absence.
The programme, developed from research by Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University in partnership with HSC NI and other stakeholders, will establish a common approach to staff well-being across the five regional health and social care trusts and the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service.
HSC NI recorded 8% of working hours lost to sickness absence in 2024/25, compared with around 5.2% in NHS England and 2% across the UK workforce overall. Work-related stress was identified by the research as one of the leading causes of absence among health and social care staff.
The pressures created by staff shortages have also raised concerns about patient safety, while average hospital outpatient waiting times in Northern Ireland increased from 43 to 64 weeks between 2020 and 2025.
The online programme will initially reach around 8,500 HSC NI staff in line-management roles. It will provide practical tools including the ‘STOP model’ and ‘Judgment Shift’, designed to help managers make decisions, communicate and lead more compassionately, while supporting earlier intervention when staff well-being concerns emerge.
The training is due to become part of line-manager induction and annual training from autumn 2026.
Dr Denise Currie of Queen’s Business School, one of the project leads, said the underlying research had established “strong links between staff well-being and the sustainability of the health and social-care workforce”, highlighting the role of supportive management practices in employees’ day-to-day experience.
Dr Heike Schroder, the other project lead, said line managers were a “critical, but often overlooked” factor in whether staff feel supported, adding that strengthening management capability could help drive wider culture change across HSC NI.
The programme draws on the HSC Workforce Wellbeing and Coping Study, which followed more than 14,400 staff across six phases of the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2023.
