BERKSHIRE'S NHS staff are increasingly experiencing bullying and discrimination at work from both patients and colleagues, a report has revealed.

Nearly one in five staff reported an increase in experiencing bullying, harassment or abuse from colleagues in 2018, up 2.8 per cent from the previous year.

Royal Berkshire Foundation Trust claimed this surge meant it had performed ‘significantly worse’ in this standard than it had in a previous staff survey.

Employees were asked to give their thoughts on how they were being looked after in the workplace and results showed 7.6 per cent of staff experienced discrimination from patients, a spike of 1 per cent from 2017 to 2018.

Another 9.5 per cent were subject to discrimination from managers and other colleagues in the same year, equalling another 1 per cent surge.

This means the RBFT is performing ‘worse’ on average than other trusts for its standards in equality, diversity and inclusion.

Talking about the increases in discrimination, Don Fairley, director of workforce at RBFT, said: “Last year we really deteriorated on that so we certainly need to do some more work in that area and the other concern is around bullying and harassment of colleagues.

“It is right for us to focus on that. We’re not an outlier in terms of the NHS, I don’t want to give the impression we’re particularly worse here at the RBH (Royal Berkshire Hospital), because it isn’t.

“However we have set this as one of our priorities and this indicates for us that we are not happy about it, so we want to focus on that.”

The authority is performing better than the average trust in 9 out of its 10 staff satisfaction indicators.

Yet work-related stress caused more than a third of staff to report feeling unwell up to 2018, a rise of 3.4 per cent.

This led to a decrease in the number of staff believing the organisation takes positive action on health and wellbeing in the workplace, despite increased satisfaction with opportunities for more flexible working patterns.

One in five told the staff survey they would ‘probably look for a new organisation in the next 12 months’, but this score was lower than the national trust average, and it was earlier reported at a meeting of directors the trust was seeing fewer nurses leave and more join.

A report outlined a “broadly positive picture in terms of historic trends and performance”, but acknowledged problem areas in work-related stress, staff looking to move on, experiences of bullying and more.

Mr Fairley continued: “There is quite a lot of work to be done. It’s a great set of results at trust level, but we’ve got some real challenges and some areas we need to address.”

The meeting was held at the Royal Berkshire Hospital on Wednesday, March 27.