The significant pressure on NHS staff poses a ‘serious risk’ to vital reforms, the Health Foundation has warned in the wake of a survey showing high levels of burnout and emotional exhaustion in the workforce.
The 2025 NHS Staff Survey showed that 35% of health service staff found their work emotionally exhausting, with 31% saying they felt burnt out.
It also found that only a third reported there were enough staff at their organisation for them to do their job properly.
The Health Foundation said that these findings underlined the urgent need for a concrete workforce plan to improve working conditions, boost morale and enable staff to improve services.
Speaking after publication of the survey, Ruth Thorlby, assistant director of policy at the charity said it ‘shows that NHS staff remain under significant pressure, posing a serious risk to the Government’s ability to deliver planned reforms’, which ‘rest on having a healthy and well-supported workforce to implement it’.
She added: ‘However, the survey suggests that the health service still has a mountain to climb to make this happen.’
Based on responses from 766,285 NHS staff, the survery also found that 42.36% of staff have felt unwell because of work-related stress in the last 12 months and 56.01% had gone into work in the last three months despite not feeling well enough to perform their duties.
Ms Thorlby said the survey underlined the ‘urgency’ of a concrete workforce plan to improve working conditions, boost morale and enable staff to improve services.
‘As well as ensuring that the NHS has adequate staff numbers in the future, the Government’s forthcoming workforce plan must place equal importance on supporting the existing workforce,’ she added.
‘Racism is disturbingly normalised’
The survey also revealed that one-in-five black and minority ethnic staff reported facing abuse, bullying or harassment from patients or the public, while 14% had faced similar behaviour from colleagues, managers or team leaders. This compared with 5% and 7% respectively for white staff.
Nearly one in 10 NHS staff (9%) said they were subjected to discrimination from patients and the public – the highest rate on record, and almost one in seven (14%) reported being physically attacked by a patient or the public last year, which was the highest rate for three years.
While 87.78% of respondents felt their job made a difference to patients, the number of staff who would recommend their workplace to others fell slightly to 58%, down from 60.79% in 2024.
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive at The King’s Fund said it is ‘completely unacceptable’ that NHS staff continue to be subject to racism.
‘Despite the Government’s ambitions to build a modern 21st‑century health service, abuse experienced by staff from ethnic minority backgrounds leaves the NHS stuck in decades past, entrenching a culture in which racism is disturbingly normalised and creating a health system that fewer staff would recommend as a place to work,’ she said.
Ms Woolnough said that the upcoming 10 Year Workforce Plan must put ‘anti-racism at its core’ and NHS leaders must embed it across their culture and leadership.
‘Anti-racism must be an action, not a label, and requires calling out discrimination, tackling subtle but harmful behaviours at play, and dismantling the systemic barriers that hold staff back to make the NHS a place people want to join and stay rather than leave,’ she added.
‘We haven’t moved fast enough’
Danny Mortimer, director general (people) for NHS England, said: ‘These figures paint a deeply-worrying picture of the abuse our hardworking NHS staff face. Staff safety and wellbeing is paramount, and we want everyone experiencing any kind of unwanted incident to feel confident enough to report it.
‘But while that behaviour is completely unacceptable, we must look at what more we can do to support the people who keep our services running.
‘We know about the everyday pressures staff face – such as not being able to get decent food on a night shift – and we haven’t moved fast enough to fix them.
‘Staff have worked so hard to improve NHS performance and deliver care over winter as shown in the latest performance figures.
‘These survey results show it is now for the NHS to deliver improvements for staff because there is so much more to do to make the NHS a better place to work.’
A version of this article was originally published by our sister publication Healthcare Leader.