Key messages 06 March 2026

Thank you to everyone who attended the employee conference on Wednesday 5 March. Your participation and questions were greatly valued.
Events like this are an important opportunity to support open communication and hear directly from staff across the organisation.
A recording of the conference along with a written summary of the question-and-answer session will be published in the coming days.

Emergency preparedness is critical to the council’s ability to protect people and keep essential services running.
Emergencies can happen without warning and everyone has a role to play – from frontline teams to senior leadership.
As part of this, senior leaders are taking part in a national power outage exercise at the end of March, testing how we would respond and make decisions during a major, prolonged loss of power.
Emergency preparedness, resilience and response training is available for all staff, helping everyone understand their role and what action to take if normal systems or services are disrupted.
This shared awareness helps protect people, supports colleagues and enables the council to maintain essential services, meet its legal duties and respond quickly and confidently when disruption occurs.
Having quick access to clear guidance, contacts and contingency arrangements helps keep people safe and ensures the council can continue delivering essential services when it matters most.

We are changing our Occupational Health provider as part of our ongoing commitment to supporting employee health and wellbeing. The existing Occupational Health contract has expired, which is why a new contract has been procured.
From 1 April 2026, Medigold Health will become our new provider, bringing a strong reputation and a comprehensive range of high‑quality Occupational Health services.
New referrals to Optima Health will close on Tuesday 17 March 2026. Existing referrals will continue to be supported to ensure continuity of care.
During the transition period, employees and managers should continue to use the Employee Assistance Programme and the wellbeing resources available on My Health and Wellbeing.
The Medigold referral portal will open on 1 April 2026.