Employer Stories:
NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s public health nursing teams can work hybrid, flex their hours, and swap shifts easily. This has reduced stress for staff, and has improved attendance rates, recruitment and retention and generated cost savings for the NHS. Team leaders Mel McLean and Maggie Moodycliffe explain more.


Employer Stories:
NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s public health nursing teams can work hybrid, flex their hours, and swap shifts easily. This has reduced stress for staff, and has improved attendance rates, recruitment and retention and generated cost savings for the NHS. Team leaders Mel McLean and Maggie Moodycliffe explain more.
Key takeaways
- Flexible working in frontline roles includes hybrid, part time, compressed hours, and different working patterns at different times of the year.
- Staff are trusted with input to rotas and shift swaps.
- Attendance rates, recruitment and retention have improved
- Employees have shared stories about how flex has reduced anxiety and stress

Key takeaways

- Flexible working in frontline roles includes hybrid, part time, compressed hours, and different working patterns at different times of the year.
- Staff are trusted with input to rotas and shift swaps.
- Attendance rates, recruitment and retention have improved
- Employees have shared stories about how flex has reduced anxiety and stress
What kind of organisation are you?
NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s 90-people-strong public health nursing teams provide school nurses and health visitors Monday to Friday to support local families.
What motivated you as an organisation to start your flexible working journey?
We’ve always been open-minded when it comes to flexible working. Some forms of flex were always possible but the impact of the pandemic really ramped things up in terms of people’s awareness of flexible working and their expectations for it. So long as we can still provide the necessary ‘boots on the ground’ and deliver the services our communities need, we’re happy to give people a bit more choice about when and where they work.
How and when did you start introducing flex/more flex?
People became so much more aware of flexible working with home working during Covid, and as and when they saw colleagues starting to work differently, they asked about it too. It’s just evolved organically. Everyone can work hybrid but we’ve noticed greater flex being used on time too, with more people are condensing their hours into fewer longer days, or slightly changing their start and finish time.
Flex today – what are you doing right now?
Hybrid
Everyone can work hybrid, and our policy is that people spend 60% of their time in the office or out and about in the community, and 40% from home.
Flexible hours
About two thirds of our teams work flexibly in another way too. Some people work condensed four-day weeks, or a nine-day fortnight, some start and finish their shifts a bit earlier. We have lots of part time staff, and while we continue working through school holidays some people do flex their hours to work slightly differently in school holidays, or at different times of the year. For example, Maggie works four longer days in the summer months and then shifts back to five slightly shorter days in the winter to give her some daylight at the end of her working day.
Rota system
We have an electronic rota system now too, which makes it easier for people to arrange their shifts around commitments outside of work. Our staff work in small teams of 3-10 people and they all know how many members of staff are needed to deliver their service safely. They’ve all worked as nurses or midwives before joining our team, so they all understand how things work and what’s at stake. We ask them to discuss shift change requests with their team before asking their manager, and this approach is working well.
Review points
Staff can make two formal requests to change their working pattern in a year and flexible working is reviewed in one-to-one sessions. This means there are regular opportunities to ask for changes and discuss how things are going.
What challenges have you faced?
Our main challenge was how to keep track of staff for safeguarding reasons when we moved to home and hybrid working. We need to know where our staff are at all times. We had to encourage much more accountability from our staff, to ensure they put everything in their diary and shared that information. We’re well used to it now but it was a challenge at first.
We’re also continuing to adapt to reduced working hours without any loss of pay, as agreed as part of a pay settlement with NHS Scotland. In April, we reduced from 37.5 hours to 37 hours, and next year we will reduce again to 36.5 or 36 hours. We still have to maintain the same service but with less staff time, and no backfill. It’s an ongoing challenge.
Impact of flexible working
We hear lots of individual stories of how flexible working helps people. For example, one of our school nurses prefers compressed hours so she has time to process paperwork at the end of the school day, rather than watching it pile up all week.
Another colleague helps care for her elderly mother and was recently able to swap shifts easily so she could take her mum to a cardiac appointment. She said she’d felt anxious in the past about asking for time off, or to change shifts, and now she can manage this herself with her team. It takes some of life’s stresses away.
Flexible working is good for us an employer too. Our attendance figures have improved. The fact people have a bit more flexibility over when and where they’re working means they can often manage home responsibilities without needing to take time off.
Our recruitment and retention rates are much better than many NHS teams too and we know a large part of that is down to the fact we can be more flexible.
We’re also saving money on fuel because staff claim less mileage. When they’ve finished their community visits, they often go straight home – if that’s closer – and work there, rather than travelling to the office. It might only save 10 miles. But that soon adds up over a year, and across a team of 90. It means we can use that budget elsewhere.
The future of flex in your organisation
We will remain open to flexible working and keep everything under review. The wider NHS plans to reduce working hours will take some time to bed in and get right. There are also local plans in Dumfries and Galloway to close schools early one day a week, and this will impact some of our staff with children. We’ll be looking at how we can support our staff and maintain services.
Top tips for flex
- Start with a flexible working policy so you have a framework to guide managers and employees.
- It’s ok to talk about any potential impact on service delivery when discussing flexible working requests. But make sure you’re open-minded to different ways of working that can get you to the same end-point.
- Set review dates with staff to discuss their flexible working. This is good for employees and the organisation to make sure you don’t continue with changes if they’re not working for both sides.
“So long as we can still provide the necessary ‘boots on the ground’ and deliver the services our communities need, we’re happy to give people a bit more choice about when and where they work.”