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Almost one in 10 NHS staff have received unwanted sexual approaches at work in the last year, according to a survey that has prompted calls to require employers to do more tackle harassment.
An annual survey of 1.4mn NHS employees in England found 8.7 per cent of staff had been targeted at least once by behaviour of a sexual nature by patients, their relatives or other members of the public. Almost 4 per cent had received a similar approach from staff or colleagues.
Responding to the findings, published on Thursday, unions said it underlined the need for employers in all sectors to do more to protect staff — and for the government to ensure they did so.
“Harassed workers are being systematically failed, not only by bad bosses who don’t care but also by a government that deliberately lets employers ignore such forms of harassment with impunity,” said Sharon Graham, general secretary of the union Unite.
New legislation set to take effect this year requires employers to “take reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. But this new requirement is weaker than the wording originally proposed, which would have required employers to take “all reasonable steps”.
The legislation, which won cross-party support but was amended in parliament, would also have made employers liable for harassment of staff by clients or service users. This clause was dropped from the Worker Protection Act on the grounds that it placed excessive burdens on business.
A similar provision making employers liable for such “third party” harassment, introduced in 2010, was repealed in 2013 after business groups objected, saying it was unrealistic for employers to control behaviour by pub customers, call centre users, care home residents or hospital patients.
The Labour opposition has pledged that if it wins office, it will launch a legislative blitz to boost workers rights and will “require employers to create and maintain workplaces . . . free from harassment, including by third parties”.
The NHS survey suggests that sexual harassment is widespread across the service’s workforce. About 11 per cent of nurses, 17 per cent of nursing assistants and 8 per cent of doctors reported at least one unwanted sexual approach from patients or service users in the past 12 months.
In the ambulance service — recently criticised in an independent review for its “deeply rooted” problems with bullying and harassment — almost one in 10 staff had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour by colleagues, and 27 per cent from patients or the public.
The question put to staff — for the first time in the survey’s 20-year history — made it clear that unwanted behaviour could include “offensive or inappropriate sexualised conversation, touching or assault”.
Alan Lofthouse, acting deputy head of health at the union Unison, said the number of sexually motivated incidents was “shocking”, adding: “Employers need to do more to ensure everyone working in the NHS, using its services or visiting patients know how to behave and what will happen to them if they don’t.”
Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive at NHS Providers, which represents senior managers at health organisations across England, said the survey’s findings were “very worrying” and that “much more needs to be done to address this issue”.
Navina Evans, chief workforce, training and education officer at NHS England, said the extent of unwanted sexual behaviour “should not be tolerated”.
The NHS had last year launched a sexual safety charter aiming to improve reporting on unacceptable behaviour, she added, and one trust had adopted a “red card” policy that could lead to the exclusion of patients or visitors who were persistently violent or abusive to staff.
