Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (HSC NI) will roll out new line manager training across its five regional trusts and the NI Ambulance Service, aimed at reducing stress-related staff absence. The programme, covering roughly 8,500 line managers, targets a workforce where sickness absence already runs well above equivalent rates in NHS England and the wider UK public sector.

The toolkit, detailed by Queen's, was developed jointly by academics at Queen's and Ulster University in partnership with HSC NI, drawing on research conducted across six phases of the pandemic between 2020 and 2023 that captured the experiences of more than 14,400 staff.

Queen's University Belfast, a Russell Group member based in Belfast, posted record research income of £124.6 million in its latest annual report. Ulster University, headquartered across Belfast, Coleraine and Derry-Londonderry, reported EBITDA of £17.3 million for the year to July 2024, against a strategic target of £18 million. HSC NI, the publicly funded provider of hospital, primary, community and social care across Northern Ireland, employs 76,855 people; its overall annual budget was not stated in relation to this training programme specifically.

The structural driver behind the initiative is the widening gap between HSC NI's sickness absence rate and comparable UK health systems, with the sector logging 8% of working hours lost to absence in 2024/25 against roughly 5.2% in NHS England, a gap researchers link directly to line-management capability rather than clinical workload alone.

Dr Denise Currie of Queen's Business School said the research "established strong links between staff wellbeing and the sustainability of the health and social-care workforce" and had "produced clear guidelines" on what shapes employees' day-to-day experience of being managed.

Her co-lead, Dr Heike Schroder, said line managers are "a critical, but often overlooked, factor in whether staff feel properly supported" and that the new training "will effectively drive positive culture change within HSC NI."

For the sector, the rollout confirms that Northern Ireland's health system is treating line-management capability, rather than headcount alone, as the lever for addressing absence and protecting patient safety amid rising waiting times.

Source: qub.ac.uk / ulster.ac.uk / digital.nhs.uk