NHS Education for Scotland
A skilled and sustainable workforce for a healthier Scotland
NHS Education for Scotland
A skilled and sustainable workforce for a healthier Scotland
NHS Education for Scotland (NES) is an education and training body and a special health board within NHSScotland, with responsibility for developing and delivering education and training for the healthcare workforce in Scotland and supporting digital services. You can find a link below to our corporate privacy notice, with its data protection officer, right to complain, contact and other key information.
To develop the Trama Informed Care Pathfinder ProQOL survey, NES is working with two NHS boards - NHS Grampian and NHS Forth Valley. The project plans to test the feasibility and value of a staff well-being survey by trialling its use. Although neither territorial board will be handling personal data, each has a role in defining and approving the survey’s purpose and the methods to be used for completing it. As a result, NHS Forth Valley and NHS Grampian are also classed as data controllers in relation to this project. You can find the staff privacy notices of each online. Please see:
NHS Forth Valley – Privacy Notice
The purpose of the survey is to better understand the wellbeing of staff working in Maternity Units, to signpost and supply self-help resources, and to develop support mechanisms to prevent compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout. Anonymised data from these surveys will help clinical leaders in your board monitor staff-group wellbeing and ensure appropriate supports are in place and available.
We will collect your email address to enable a report to be sent to you. The email address will then be separated from the survey results, making the data truly anonymous.
*The Microsoft Forms ‘hidden identity’ option is used in the surveys, so no other potentially person-identifiable information, such as browser type and version, internet IP address or operating system is stored with the answers.
The survey has been designed to collect the minimum amount of necessary personal data necessary to achieve its aims. We will collect your:
Once your email address is removed from the work area and results it will not be possible to identify you. The survey data does not include demographic data that can be linked so that an individual could be identified, for example age and job title.
Data controllers are required to have a lawful basis when using personal information.
The purpose of the survey is to support the delivery of efficient and effective healthcare by ensuring our staff are appropriately supported. Consequently, all Controllers involved in this activity rely upon the following lawful basis:
It should be noted that there is no duty to take part in the survey. Choosing not to respond will have zero impact on your employment.
The survey is conducted by NES on behalf of the territorial boards. NES will not share personal data collected with any other organisation, including your employer. Only high-level aggregate data - from which no individual can be identified - will be shared to help employing boards understand how staff groups can be better supported.
We only keep your personal data for as long as needed to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected. This means NES will hold personal data for a maximum of 12 weeks* after personal survey results are sent back to each respondent. The data will then be made anonymous with the removal of email addresses - and analysed.
*This is the time the survey is open for responses.
The Professional Quality of Life Scale, known as the ProQOL, is the most commonly used measure of the positive and negative effects of working with people who have experienced extremely stressful events. The scale is particularly useful for professionals to self-monitor their satisfaction and as a prompt for self-care. In addition, service managers seeking to facilitate staff wellbeing can use the ProQOL to track professional quality of life over time.
Professional quality of life incorporates two aspects, the positive (Compassion Satisfaction) and the negative (Compassion Fatigue). Compassion fatigue breaks into two parts. The first part concerns things such like exhaustion, frustration, anger and depression typical of burnout. Secondary Traumatic Stress is a negative feeling driven by fear and work‐related trauma. Some trauma at work can be direct (primary) trauma. In other cases, work‐related trauma be a combination of both primary and secondary trauma.
While therapists were the original target, the measure is used widely with other groups including medical health professionals (particularly nurses), teachers, lawyers, humanitarian workers, social service employees, public service employees such as law enforcement, reporters and journalists, juries at trials, and even soldiers and peace-keepers. A key aspect about interpreting the ProQOL is that it is not a diagnostic test. It is impossible to diagnose depression or any other disorder from the result of the ProQOL.
Only information given by the data subject in response to the ProQOL questions is used. The ProQOL tool collects data on the areas described above to automatically calculate a score for each as follows: (1) Several of these initial scores must undergo a further calculation in accordance with the ProQOL method - a value reversal. (2) The scores are added to give a sum total for each area. (3) Some common statistical processing is applied to make the raw totals into meaningful scores. For further information please see: ProQOL - The Concise Manual. 2nd edition. Available online at: The Concise ProQOL Manual (wsimg.com)
ProQOL 5 itself is stable across time, which means that the scores across time reflect changes in the person, not in the measure itself. Some people self-administer the ProQOL at a regular self-determined interval to see how they are doing.
To learn more about how your personal data is processed, how to contact the NES Data Protection Officer, and your range of rights including those to request erasure, object, and to complain, please see our NES main privacy notice at: