Hello, nurses and support workers - welcome to your future at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LYPFT).
We’re a specialist mental health and learning disability trust. We’re also a learning and teaching organisation with a strong commitment to research, development and progression.
Our vision is to provide outstanding services as an employer of choice, so we hope you’ll choose to work with us. One of the many things that makes us attractive to people is the truly diverse range of services we provide. There’s too many to list here but you can have a look through them on our website.
We employ more than 1,360 nursing staff from students and apprentices, to senior nurse leaders like our Director of Nursing and Professions, Cathy Woffendin.
It sets out how we strive to provide the best quality of experience for our service users, as well as our commitments over the next three years to support our nurses and support workers to do just that.
Here’s a short video of Cathy to introduce it.
We’re proud of our nurses and support workers
Our nursing workforce continues to grow and develop. We embrace those who are following apprentice pathways or are taking up the associate practitioner and nursing associate roles, in addition to the more established roles of registered nurses and health care support workers.
We are immensely proud of our nurses, support workers and allied health professionals. But what do they think of the Trust as a place to work? Well, we asked some of them and this is what they told us.
Not only are we proud of our nursing staff, we also aspire to be a learning organisation. Our commitment to learning requires us to invest and strengthen our research and development pathways for nursing.
Nurses are the bedrock of our Trust, working with people so they feel safe, cared for and respected. We have a strong foundation of excellent staff, but we need to make sure they are equipped to meet the ever-changing and exciting challenge of providing care in the future.
To keep pace, we must be active in new ways of working, drive innovation and exercise our influence, to make sure that we continue to provide safe and effective care, to the communities we serve.
Our nursing strategy is based on several important drivers. It has been created with our nursing staff, taking into consideration what nursing means to them and what makes them proud to nurse.
Training and Development Opportunities
We actively encourage you to think about what training and development would help you in your career and link this to your appraisal. Here’s a flavour of what we can offer:
Harriet Burrows, a band 6 charge nurse on a female inpatient mental health ward in Leeds, tells us her story so far.
I studied mental health nursing in Leeds and was able to do my placements at the Trust which I really enjoyed. I thought the way staff worked with service users was fantastic and they were really supportive to me too. They were continually pushing me to develop. As a student you can sometimes avoid the scary things but staff here always pushed me to get full range of experience.
When I qualified I went to work in Bradford in the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). This is kind of like the mental health equivalent of A&E. It’s fast paced, high pressure but it stood me in good stead because you have to think on your feet and apply yourself creatively. For example, we did a lot of work to de-escalate difficult situations without getting ‘hands on’ with very challenging patients. It’s something I’ve been able to apply in my role here and my time in the PICU has helped me progress quickly.
I was able to get a job with the Trust as a band 5 staff nurse in November 2015, and moved up to a band 6 charge nurse working with female inpatients in the following February.
My role now still involves a lot of the clinical responsibilities, like developing care plans and conducting risk assessments, but there’s also a lot of communication. For example, one to one time with the service users to assess their needs, speaking with other professionals to get opinions and create a full care picture of a person, speaking to partner agencies to arrange a person’s discharge from hospital, and of course, speaking to relatives, friends and carers who are so crucial in supporting a person on their recovery.
As well as the clinical side of things, as a charge nurse you are there to support your colleagues and ensure they get proper clinical supervision. I think that’s something we do really well here. Part of my role is to support nurses to implement changes to our practice such as the introduction of the Purposeful Inpatient Admission model, or PIPA. The aim of PIPA is to improve efficiency of an inpatient admission and get people out of hospital quickly, removing barriers to discharge like sorting out any housing problems or safeguarding issues.
At the end of the day, nobody wants to be in hospital for a long time. I see how it can debilitate people and take their skills away, so working to discharge someone as soon as they are ready is so important.
It feels like we’ve got a really supportive team at LYPFT. And people really push you to develop – it’s not something that you get in every trust.
Working for LYPFT has enabled me to gain valuable knowledge and skills which will help me to further my career. The Trust recognises and rewards hard work and is always supportive of staff development, offering opportunities to participate in further learning.
The care afforded to our service users is excellent and we are always looking for ways to improve the quality of care that we provide. You see staff going above and beyond for patients every day. It makes you feel you are working in an environment which is doing the best it can for people.
Michael Murdoch is a Nursing Associate for Learning Disability Services. He tells us about his journey through the training programme and gives some advice to new trainees.
On Valentine’s Day 2019 I checked my inbox. I had mail and it was the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) with an exciting email inviting me to join the register. After paying my fee and confirming my fitness to practice, I then became one of the first ever Registered Nursing Associates. Two years ago, this moment felt so long away with me doubting my ability to achieve a degree and anxieties if the role would even come to fruition.
I have always been a good support worker and passionate about my job. I have always looked to develop my skills and access any courses to improve my knowledge. Unfortunately, I have never been in a situation where I could leave my post and go to university so thanks to the Nursing Associate programme, the road to being a registered professional was opened.
The role of Nursing Associate is now recognised and regulated by the NMC. I and many others have some exciting, yet tough days ahead to establish the role within a wide variety of different settings. It is positive to see that in most areas the role is being recognised and respected. The training has opened up a whole new world for nursing. It seems that now support workers have the opportunity to unleash their true potential.
I have the joy of seeing many peers following in my footsteps and doing the training for themselves. It is such a good journey. My advice is to enjoy it. Make the most out of each placement, get involved and learn as much as you can. Also downloading the British National Formulary (BNF) app helped me loads when learning about various medications during my different placements.
Plan your essays well in advance and do not leave them until the last minute – this was one of my biggest regrets with assignments. It’s a good idea to really spend some time on your references and make sure they are matching the Leeds Harvard tool. You will be surprised what a difference references make to your overall score.
I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity and even luckier to have the support I have around me. I am now looking forward to working through my preceptorship and to developing into the role of a Registered Nursing Associate.
In this video you’ll hear from Lucy, a Health Support Worker in our Memory Services. Lucy won an award from our Trust for her dedicated work with people living with dementia.
Stacey Atkinson is a Matron/Manager and Lead Nurse for Learning Disability Services. She tells us about her varied and rewarding career in learning disability nursing.
Many moons ago I was a support worker for people with learning disabilities working at what were then the big institutions in Leeds including Meanwood Park Hospital. It was an interesting place, often not for the right reasons, but I loved the job! I found the client group challenging, interesting, surprising, vulnerable to the point I wanted to protect them and so, so rewarding to work with.
I wanted more though. I wanted to change the way things were done, to give people more autonomy and enable their rights. I felt frustrated and not listened to. I wanted a voice both for myself and for the people I looked after – so I looked into doing my nurse training.
Because of my experience and qualifications there were no issues with regards to me doing my nurse training and again I loved it. It gave me a wealth of further experience and whereas I felt I was never really academic at school, I was now studying something I really enjoyed. For the first time in my life, I excelled.
On qualifying I had an array of different roles:
– group home manager for people with learning disabilities
– deputy manager on a ward at Meanwood Park for people with challenging behaviour
– community nurse for children with learning disabilities
– community nurse for adults with learning disabilities
– later, I also went into education teaching learning disability nursing for 12 years
In 2016 I returned to nursing as a matron/manager and lead nurse. The rewarding part of the job is seeing staff grow and develop and being able to support them in encouraging excellence within services.
I have so far had a fabulous career. There have been challenges, and these have made me grow, but there have been many positives. I’ve been awarded prestigious nursing awards but more positively the relationships I’ve developed with both service users and colleagues have kept me focussed and maintained my interest in the profession.
Learning disability nursing, for me, is the best career anyone could have, but then I am biased! If you are a support worker thinking about being a nurse, I fully recommend it. Think about what you can have. I’d certainly do it all again if I could.
I studied mental health nursing in Leeds and was able to do my placements at the Trust which I really enjoyed. I thought the way staff worked with service users was fantastic and they were really supportive to me too. They were continually pushing me to develop. As a student you can sometimes avoid the scary things but staff here always pushed me to get full range of experience.
Council (NMC) with an exciting email inviting me to join the register. After paying my fee and confirming my fitness to practice, I then became one of the first ever Registered Nursing Associates. Two years ago, this moment felt so long away with me doubting my ability to achieve a degree and anxieties if the role would even come to fruition.
then the big institutions in Leeds including Meanwood Park Hospital. It was an interesting place, often not for the right reasons, but I loved the job! I found the client group challenging, interesting, surprising, vulnerable to the point I wanted to protect them and so, so rewarding to work with.