What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

There has been a Trust wide increase in staff seeking support since April who have been impacted by COVID-19 with many attending drop in clinics.

The presence of a localised staff Counsellor, in ED, providing twice weekly drop in psychological and staff wellbeing support sessions

The service has evolved as we have come out of lockdown through collaboration with the ED team, nurses and doctors. The pre-existing ‘coping’ culture of ED has evolved and discussions about having chats with the staff counsellor and clinical psychology are much more common place. We debrief with more frequency and have a healthier attitude and culture in the ED.

Before psychological support was physically present in the ED, very few members of staff from ED would access the service in fear that they would be considered unable to perform their role or be seen as “weak”. Throughout covid-19, many more have accessed the service.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The idea of this project is to look at how we can use this positive impact of visible localised psychological support in the ED to go to other areas in the hospital.  We wish to extend this offer to our paediatric team, theatre staff and encourage our BAME community too within these new areas and ED to ask for support.  Anecdotal evidence has confirmed that our paediatric colleagues have a high rate of burn out in the consultant body.

Anecdotal feedback for this service has been excellent and research within this area has shown the positive impact of psychological support so it would be great to provide a uniformed service across the hospital.

We would also like to  develop the ‘thinking pitstops’ initiative across the Trust to provide a listening space for all staff to access, following attendance and experiences by other Trust staff of accessing this service.

How will the project be delivered?

We would look to appoint a member of staff to run this service in these areas initially.

First we would look at formalising the change that has occurred so far. We would also need to look at data collection and review our measures for demonstrating improvement. We would then have to identify key stakeholders in a few specialties, e.g. paediatrics, theatres, BAME and identify the team to take this forward. We would have to look at what service could realistically be delivered, then we would aim to reproduce the process in ED with these specialties, adjusting it to the needs of these specialties and should we be able to expand this within the time available, identify suitable other areas.

We would work with our comms team to develop publicity material, through a combination of mediums to engage with staff to realise that it is ‘ok to not be ok’.

How is your project going to share learning?

We would share learning within the hospital with bulletins and specific sharing events. We would also be able to produce infographics to show the processes that we have been through, results of information gathered and would be able to share this through twitter and so share through a national platform. There is also a regional patient safety and quality improvement event which we would be able to share our findings.

We would look to ensure that our learning is shared with other Trust departments and as part of the wider Health and Wellbeing strategy.

We would look to identify how this approach can be shared across the wider local system/STP/ICS

We would look to encourage and empower those who have accessed the service to provide testimonials on the benefit of attending and the impact it had on them.