DOZENS of focus groups are to be held at Staffordshire's biggest hospital after officials admitted part of its workforce has lost its commitment to the organisation.

Hosted by senior executives, the meetings will start at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in September to try and restore faith in the complex among employees.

Around 400 staff will be invited to the first wave starting in September with the numbers rising to 1,000 by the end of the year.

They will focus on what management can do to improve their job satisfaction with sets of questions tailor-made for each department.

The initiative, called Listening into Action, comes after only 311 employees from the 7,000 workforce responded to a national survey carried out throughout the NHS by the Government every year.

The uptake was one of the worst in the country but a large proportion of those taking part said they were unhappy about the quality of work they were able to deliver.

Directors said they would listen to all ideas put forward but needed to be open and honest enough to point out if any suggestions were impossible to carry out.

Since hundreds of jobs were axed at the Hartshill centre to claw back mounting debts two years ago, a series of changes have been introduced and despite improvements in the past two months, the A&E unit has been most under pressure.

Chief executive Julia Bridgewater, below, said: "We have spent two years trying to improve things but somewhere along the way we needed to make sure commitment from staff was with us and we forgot about that a bit. The staff survey shows we need to put more focus on that and so the listening sessions will be taken by executives.

"Our staff are our biggest advocates and critics in their own communities and we need to keep them on board.

"But if people want things we cannot deliver such as 4,000 parking spaces near their department door, we need to be realistic and say we cannot do it."

Medical director Robert Courteney-Harris said specialist hospitals with small numbers of patients traditionally topped the satisfaction survey and that was because they felt ownership in their work.

He added: "We need to learn lessons from that, break our large organisation into small units and engage with their staff in ways that make them feel in charge of their own destiny and have a belief they have some power over things."

In a separate initiative, the trust is to boost its internal communications system so staff are kept more in the loop over events at the trust.

Human resources director Margot Johnson said: "We have asked staff how they find out about things at the hospital and they say it is either through The Sentinel or from Stan who drives the shuttle bus."