Jill's blog of burning issues: Leadership and staff wellbeing

Supporting staff and their wellbeing.

The last few weeks have been rather hectic for all of us as we prepare for the arrival of the CQC, at the same time as getting on with our busy day jobs. As a result of this, I’ve slipped a bit on writing my blogs on the burning issues that came out of the staff listening events earlier this year – apologies for that.

In this blog, I am focusing on two issues: leadership and staff wellbeing.

Leadership

People find it quite hard to define what leadership is and to separate it from the task of management. The following quote by the highly-influential management consultant Professor Peter F. Drucker sums it up very succinctly:

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Doing the right things means having a proper strategy in place from which we can all take our lead so we know we are working on the “right things”. Our work to refresh our strategy reached a critical point recently when we concluded the last of our online conversations with staff and other stakeholders. All the insight from this work will feed into a draft strategy document which will be considered by our Council of Governors and Board of Directors at their respective meetings in late July. It will also be shared more widely with staff and stakeholders for further consultation to ensure we’ve listened and got it right.

I want to thank all those who took time out of their busy working lives to participate in this.
The comments we received back from our listening events about leadership told us that staff:

• feel there is too much variance of leadership quality across the Trust
• want to feel more connected to managers and team leaders
• want to be able to trust leaders and be trusted by them, and
• want to be informed about their role and what is expected of them.

It’s so important we have a set of values and behaviors that everyone, including leaders, can use to ensure they work and behave in a way that meets our collective expectations. That’s why we included values and behaviors in the strategy refresh work and online conversations.

It’s equally important that we hold each other to account to ensure the agreed values and behaviors live in our culture. Leadership will play a key role in this and our ongoing organisational development.

We support leaders and managers to access external development programmes, including the national NHS Leadership Academy development opportunities. We also provide in-house development for both our experienced leaders and managers and those who are aspiring into these roles.

Having taken feedback from our care groups, we are now developing a new skills-based programme of leadership and management, which will be launched later this year. We also support the use of 360 degree feedback, using the NHS Health Care Leadership Model, and a number of in-house facilitators are available to give feedback to those involved.

Staff health and wellbeing

There is a huge body of evidence that shows a happy and healthy workforce means improved experience and outcomes for service users. Feedback from the listening events and other sources told us that staff want more support for their physical and mental health and they feel frustrated because sometimes they can’t do their jobs properly because of this.

Over the last few years we have tried to implement a lot of health and wellbeing initiatives, some successful but others less so. We know that there is not one magic solution to this, but rather a combination of both organisational and individual responsibilities to make change and improvements.

I am concerned that our sickness levels have increased over the last couple of years and, for me, this is an indicator that we need to do more to support staff to remain in work. Building personal and team resilience is really important as continual change is simply business as usual in the NHS.

We have a range of benefits and supportive measures to help you maintain and improve your wellbeing at work but sometimes these get forgotten or staff don’t have the time to find out about them. So I thought it would be useful to give a quick summary of a few really good examples of where I think we offer some great support to staff.

Our Occupational Health Service
OH offer a wealth of advice and support for staff and managers about absence and health issues. This includes access to a Registered Mental Health Nurse, Occupational Health Advisors, Occupational Health Physician and Occupational Therapy. MOT checks for staff are also available.

Our In-house Physio
Staff can refer themselves to our own in-house physio, Joe Loftus. Since this service was introduced in 2015 it’s been a very successful and highly praised by those who’ve benefited from it. The service, which includes preventative support and treatment, has been having an impact on musculoskeletal-related absences from work such as back pain – one of the leading causes of sickness absence.

Our Employee Assistance Programme
The EAP provides a wealth of information on everything from debt counselling to child care, healthy eating to smoking cessation, through a 24/7 web based information system. You can also get quick and easy access to counselling, face to face or over the phone. This help and support is also offered free to family and friends.

And finally…
Good luck to everyone for this week’s CQC inspection. Whilst we know there are areas where we still need to improve, you all have a great deal to be proud of and I hope we can all use this opportunity to share with the CQC inspectors the fantastic work that you do every day.

Jill Copeland,
Interim Chief Executive