Friday 29 May 2020

Joining together, while staying apart

Here's me (top) and
Claire Warhurst (bottom)

Partnerships have always been important, but this crisis has highlighted more than ever the importance of working together to help keep people safe. 

We’ve seen bucket loads of innovation, ingenuity, determination and goodwill across the board, with so many impressive initiatives and developments. It’s the only way to solve the major challenges we all face in the NHS and care sector.  

Partnerships will never work as a bolt on; they have to be at the heart of what we do. I don’t just mean with other organisations, but also with patients, carers and community groups. 

And let’s not forget our volunteers. It's Volunteers' Week next week, and our 70 volunteers give their time for free; working in partnership with us, to help others. They are such a hugely valued and priceless part of our team.

We can’t solve things on our own and need to build on our collective strengths as well as this momentum. This is how we will truly make a positive impact on the world we live in.

The Stockport improvement board took place yesterday and is a positive example of partnership working. We’ve now got a memorandum of understanding with Stepping Hill Hospital around how we support people with mental health problems who come into their A&E department.  This week’s guest blog is from Claire Warhurst, our liaison mental health service manager in Stockport, and her personal and powerful account of the last ten weeks highlights some of the fantastic partnership working that is taking place there.

Our resilience hub, which is now supporting essential frontline workers, is another outstanding example of partnership. Our learning disability team has been researching Covid-19 distress in people with learning disability jointly with the Cheshire and Wirral Partnership, which is hugely important. We’ve also extended our helpline to take calls from the Greater Manchester clinical assessment service, which means working closely with Greater Manchester Mental Health and North West Boroughs. 

There are too many local examples of superb partnership to mention, with our associate directors across the five boroughs leading the way in establishing place-based approaches to recovery.

We need to keep building on our partnerships across our communities, boroughs, region and beyond, but also with you. Given that you are our most valuable asset, it’s essential we keep on moving forward together.

Despite the coronavirus restrictions and challenges, we’re doing everything we can to engage with you in meaningful ways to hear your views and listen to your ideas.  Maybe, as some have suggested, that’s why we should refer to it as ‘physical distancing’, not ‘social distancing’. It seems like semantics, but social distancing is a phrase that triggers our minds to think of isolation, solitude, loneliness. It suggests that this challenging period is one in which we are alone. And, although it has definitely felt like that on occasions, we are also together in so many ways.

Keeping in touch has never been more important and the technology we have at our fingertips is playing a crucial role in enabling us to remain socially together, despite the need to stay physically apart. It was so great to hear that we had over 200 people sign up for the two remote conversation sessions on home working. 

We’ve got a huge task ahead of us in terms of implementing our recovery plan, but we’ll make sure we keep on working in partnership with you. Two heads are better than one (well, many thousands in our case) and by sourcing views and ideas from each other, we have a better chance of overcoming all our challenge, as well as grabbing the opportunities.

As well as keeping the good bits we put in place to deal with the pandemic, we’ll also be tweaking some things as our ‘new normal’ becomes more established. For example, our new Together update, which we put in place at the start of lockdown to share heart-warming stories and sterling shout outs, is now going down to three days a week instead of daily. We’ve had great feedback, so know there’s an appetite for sharing the love, but we’ll reduce this by a couple of days as we beef up some other ways of communicating.

I’m also going to go back to fortnightly blogs, as we don’t want to add to the email overload and this now feels right. Again, I’m looking at other ways to keep more in touch, for example a live Q&A session once we’re a little more advanced in our recovery plan.  

And finally, I’m sure you will join me in welcoming Nicky Tamanis as our new director of finance. We had an impressive calibre of candidates which is so positive, but I am sure Nicky will add a huge amount to the organisation.  It was weird not being able to shake their hands at the start of the socially distanced interviews, but these are strange times as we know.  There was no elbow bumping, Namaste bowing or waving in its place for the interviews, but plenty of smiling and nodding, especially at the outcome!

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Claire Warhurst, Liaison Mental Health Service Manager at Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport

I worked in mental health liaison during the Manchester Arena bombing, so when the coronavirus took hold of the UK, I knew that trauma would be coming our way. It wasn’t just patients that would need care during the pandemic, colleagues would need it too.

I’ve been working as a mental health professional on the general side, in medical wards and A&E with doctors and nurses in main hospitals and acute trusts that deal with physical health – so it’s been an unusual position to be in. 

We’ve really got involved with what has been happening at Stepping Hill Hospital. A lot of their feelings are the same as ours, feeling that we’re all a bit lost, that sometimes you’re doing your best but it doesn’t feel good enough. For any member of staff, for example, the idea that they couldn’t do any more to make sure a person still has their relative with them at the end of their life is very hard to take.

It does feel odd to get positives out of such a difficult and incredibly hard time, but there are positives that will come of this. The progress around mental health in A&E during the time of the pandemic has been rapid, we’re assisting with the development of new pathways and processes around mental health and risk assessment – an improved culture of keeping people safe. Such progress would have been very difficult to do before, but the current conditions have made this positive work possible.

We’ve been supporting hospital staff with our skills in mental health, as their job has been hideous at times. It’s involved a lot of human kindness and a lot of time, but it’s made a massive difference to relationships with colleagues and friends in the acute trusts.

There is a very different culture in physical health hospitals - they’re not always great at looking after wellbeing and mental health, so it can be challenging addressing them. They don’t generally do talking about how they are, but things have changed through this pandemic for the better. 

A big part of making this change is by being human: seeing them in person, saying hello and being supportive where needed. Anxiety is shared across all staff, lots of nurses have been scared, exhausted emotionally and physically and have experienced so much grief. They just need a human to be there for them, be kind and understand.

There have been lots of moments I never imagined I would see - some of it is traumatic for us as well as them - so sharing those experiences has bonded us as professionals. For example, we’ve supported grieving relatives who have come to pick up belongings of their loved ones, stood with nurses who are caring for dying patients, spoken to intensive care unit staff doing 12 hour shifts in full personal protective equipment and much more. 

Our team has done everything they can with the highest level of human empathy. Working in liaison on the front line means you’re having to do very quick, high pressured assessments and make big decisions for people. You have to be a special kind of person to do that and it’s made us such a tight bunch. We were a close team before, but during the pandemic we have eaten together, laughed together and cried together. It’s been a privilege to share that experience with them and the hospital staff we have worked with.

Overall, the whole experience has been phenomenally human and the positive reception we have had has at times made me want to weep. I take my hat off to everyone on the front line who has dealt with the coronavirus crisis, both in the acute hospitals and our own wards. 

I hope going forward we’ll be known at Stepping Hill as the mental health team that were with them during that difficult time and this culture of talking will stick. 

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Best wishes,

Claire
You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2

Friday 22 May 2020

Mindfulness Matters


Here's me (top) and Suzanne Lynch,
with her home-grown spinach:
"finally ready to harvest, although
I've grown so attached to it now
I might find it hard to eat!" (bottom) 
I mentioned in my previous blog about taking annual leave during this pandemic to rest and recharge, and also the importance of being kind to ourselves as well as to others. As you know, ’kindness’ is the theme for this year’s mental health awareness week, in addition to being one of our four values.

Henry James, the novelist, said: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind”.  But why is it so easy to be kind to a loved one, a friend, a neighbour, a stranger – and not ourselves?

We appreciate kindness. We welcome kindness. We value kindness. But we tend to dismiss the value and healing quality of kindness directed toward ourselves.

The little voice in our heads says, “But if I’m too kind to myself, I won’t get anything done!”. This just adds to our stress and anxiety. Surely if our compassion does not include ourselves, then it is not complete?

So, in the true spirit of ‘being kind to myself’, I’ve taken a bit of space to switch off and had a few days of annual leave this week.

I’ve therefore not done a lengthy blog this week, but I’m delighted that we have Suzanne Lynch from our staff wellbeing service for the guest blog. Suzanne has been doing some fantastic work around the power of meditation, so I thought it would be very timely to hear from her.

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Suzanne Lynch, counsellor & mindfulness teacher, staff wellbeing service


The Mindfulness Lessons of Lockdown


Lockdown has been a different experience for everyone; nearly nine weeks on, being asked to contribute to this blog has given me an opportunity to pause and reflect on the mindfulness lessons I’ve learnt from lockdown.

The week immediately before lockdown, like many colleagues, I was using up my annual leave entitlement before the end of March; I thought I’d be doing a spot of decorating and some relaxing with a capital R – instead, I was pelting up-and-down the motorway visiting elderly relatives as far-flung as Essex, making sure they had everything they needed before their 12 week shielding began.

There was nothing mindful about my state of mind at that time; I was stressed, confused about different advice coming from various health officials and hyper-vigilant about protocols, since my partner has an underlying health condition.

In the mindfulness courses we teach, we talk about the seven pillars that underpin mindfulness.  Once lockdown properly began, I was forced to slow down, reconsider priorities and learn more about the pillars of mindfulness from the lessons that lockdown presented to me:

Lesson - Acceptance
Acceptance that I have no control over current circumstances and no control over when this situation will come to an end – acceptance that abiding by the guidance will keep us all safer, acceptance too that I may as well adjust to the new routine and rhythm of life for now.

Lesson 2 – Letting go
Of what I am not able to do and what is not within the remit of my role… accepting that guilt may be a consequence of that. Thank you psychologist, Jo Black, for your hugely helpful article Dealing with guilt during Covid-19: NHS staff not on the frontline.

Lesson 3 – Curiosity/Beginner’s Mind
I thought I lived in a fairly suburban area because I always turned left out of my front door for a walk. I never realised that if I turned right instead, less than 10 minutes’ walk away there is a field with cows and buttercups.  Also, I now know where and in what order wild garlic, bluebells, tulips and cherry blossom grow in my neighbourhood; it’s been an education.

Lesson 4 – Non-striving
Working remotely from home: Citrix anyone? Installing Outlook? Scheduling a meeting in Microsoft Teams? Getting on to ESR? I’m technology averse at the best of times; sometimes, doing these basic IT tasks feels like threading a camel through the eye of a needle whilst my temperature rises, shoulders tense and teeth grit.  Mindfulness has taught me to recognise these symptoms of stress and to take a breath, call a colleague to ask for help or leave it for now, focus on another task and try again tomorrow...

Lesson 5 – Non-judgment
…of teenagers who walk or cycle three-a-breast down a narrow lane whilst us oldies are dedicatedly trying to social distance…non-judgment is always a work in progress…

Lesson 6 – Trust
Trust that change and situations we cannot control can sometimes turn out for the best. Last weekend at the supermarket a new team member told me that due to Covid-19 he’d been made redundant a month ago. He’d been a supervisor in a completely different job for 15 years, he’d had to commute to work and was stressed out by the workplace politics.  As soon as he was let go, he contacted his local supermarket and started the very next day. Now, he says, he walks five minutes to work, has more time with his family and has a laugh everyday with his workmates.

Lesson 7 – Patience
Be patient - the spinach seeds you’ve planted in the back yard as your first foray into gardening will eventually grow…

Extra Lesson – Kindness
Kindness has been all around.  Each week at the Thursday Clap for Carers, as neighbours we all check in on each other especially those who live alone and have socially distanced chats. Compost has been shared over fences for vegetable planting – and I now know all my neighbours names.

Extra Lesson – Gratitude
I’m grateful to all my mindfulness teachers over the last five years at Pennine Care – Peter, Christina, David and Paddy – for giving me the tools of mindfulness practice to help ground and anchor in difficult or uncertain times.  It’s not a wonder-cure and it’s not necessarily going to change anything, but it might change how I react to situations - sometimes for the better.  I’m grateful for the comradeship of the team I work in at Pennine Care.  I’m deeply grateful and in awe of our frontline staff in every area and department. Please take good care, wishing you all well.

***********************************************************************************Best wishes,
Claire
You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2

Friday 15 May 2020

The end of the beginning


Here's me (top) and
Jane Royle (bottom)
We’re now into week eight of the lockdown and this is best described as “the end of the beginning”.

I think it’s no exaggeration to say that this pandemic is one of the most disruptive, impactful, life-changing events in our lifetime.  From an aspirational perspective, perhaps everybody living through the pandemic will realise, for a time, what is really important in our lives.

Like a lot of you, I watched Boris’ address to the nation last Sunday with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. It’s positive that we can exercise more, and with garden centres opening up, there is scope for the green fingered amongst us to use weeding and planting as a continued distraction.

But we still can’t hug many of our loved ones living away from us and we still can’t get a haircut! I know it’s not the biggest priority right now, but I was a bit gutted that the hairdressers won’t be opening up anytime soon. My short hair desperately needs a trim and I’ve either got to risk a DIY job to tame my mane or let my locks grow out wildly over the next few months. Matt Walsh, our patient safety lead, has done a grand job on his own hair with clippers, so I am sorely tempted to follow his example and have a go!

But back to the serious stuff, now that this first set of changes to the lockdown rules have been announced, we’re working through what this means for our organisation.

I talked about the four phases of the pandemic in last week’s blog, from escalation to ‘building back better’. But I thought it would be helpful to say a bit more about phase 2 - the ‘restore’ part of the recovery effort which we have just moved into, that runs up until the end of June.

This phase is focused on planning for the restoration of services that may have been stopped or limited during escalation, and planning for the increased demand that will come with the relaxation of lockdown measures over the next few months.

So, there are several big pieces of work that we have started to support us in this.

We’re looking at how we provide clinical services over the remainder of the year and still keep people safe. This includes looking at ward occupancy levels and how our community services are delivered, and at the same time looking at how we could manage a 5%, 10% and 15% increase in activity.  There is now a wide spread consensus that the psychological impact of the pandemic will create a surge in mental ill health that we need to prepare for.

We will also be undertaking an ‘appreciative enquiry’: talking to you about your experience over the last eight weeks, as well as talking to our patients about how it has felt, in order to see what has worked, what we want to keep, and what changes we need to make.

For example, during April, we held over 600 video consultations with patients via ‘Attend Anywhere’, Zoom and other platforms. They haven’t worked for everyone, but overall we’ve had very positive feedback from clinicians and patients. So, this could become part of our ‘new normal’.

The same goes for working from home. This hasn’t worked for everyone, and I can only imagine how stressful this has been for those of you juggling child caring responsibilities with work, but there have been some huge benefits too. So, we will be working through what our approach to working from home should look like as schools start to re-open, but being mindful that we will need to maintain social distancing for some time to come.

As a result, we expect to see Trust HQ and some of our other buildings looking different, as we’re considering taking this opportunity to free up more space within buildings for other longer term uses. For example, we talked about creating enough space in Trust HQ for a training and development centre before the pandemic, so this is a great opportunity to look at whether we could somehow organise how we work in an agile and safe way to incorporate that.

I know there are 1,200 of you currently working from home, which is over a quarter of our entire workforce, and you understandably want to know exactly what is going to happen with that. We just need to evaluate and plan this very carefully, but I hope we can share a bit more by the end of next week, although we don’t realistically expect any major changes before the end of June.

We also need to consider our staff who are currently deployed to other teams. Over 40 of you, so swiftly and positively, moved to help other teams. This was never permanent, as you know, but we need to think about a planned approach for your return to your substantive ‘day job’.

And of course, at the very heart of our recovery plan is your wellbeing and resilience.

The pace and extent of our disruptive transformation driven by this coronavirus crisis would have been unimaginable at the start of this year. We’ve radically redesigned ways of working, many overnight, and lives have been turned upside down and inside out. Resilience is about how we recharge, not how we endure, and we will continue to place a heavy emphasis on staff health and wellbeing over the coming months.

Next week is mental health awareness week, and the theme this year is kindness: one of our values. We need to be kind to each other, but most importantly to ourselves.

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Huge changes have taken place across our community mental health services, as well as on our wards, with tremendous work taking place in our dedicated teams across our boroughs. As we plan for an increase in mental ill-health as a result of the pandemic, it is clear that our community services are going to play a critical role in the coming months. So for this week’s guest blog, I have asked Jane Royle, a community mental health team manager, to share her experiences.

JANE ROYLE, TEAM MANAGER OF NORTH COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH TEAM

In my 33 years of nursing, I have never been involved in such a major and rapid change in the way services are delivered, and feel so lucky to work with a team who have been so collaborative and adaptable.


We never thought at the beginning of the pandemic that we would be working this way for this long. So, we’ve recently been reflecting on the changes we have made in our team.
It was hard to keep up with all the communication and changes at the beginning of the pandemic and make sure I was giving my team all the latest advice.  The biggest challenges being PPE, implementing social distancing in the office, the limitations of patients homes and home working.

I’m seeing so many people showing great initiative during the pandemic. Our management team, clinicians and administrators are working flexibly to support all of our patients - in particular our support workers, who have been undertaking all sorts of roles and going above and beyond with such kindness and initiative.


We’re really vigilant about protecting our inpatient wards and are not currently attending ward rounds and mental health tribunals
. Using other methods of technology like zoom and Microsoft Teams has been effective and something we would like to continue going forward.


The response from patients and carers while we’ve had to change the way we deliver our services has been very positive.  We always work really hard to establish good relationships with our patients and their loved ones, so we anticipated seeing us wearing PPE could be unsettling for them. The vast majority of patients are accepting when they see us wearing PPE though, and tell us it makes them feel safe and protected.


Our patients have told me they have really appreciated us calling in, especially those who are shielding and isolated. They often chat to us from their gardens and through the window  when we are delivering medication and food, and are really grateful for our support.


We feel anxious about less face to face contact with our patients and look forward to a time when things will get back to normal. We are making steps to restart some of our clinics with social distancing measures - it’s really important that we reassure  our patients and explain how this will be done when we inform them of this.


Daily team meetings and keeping in touch are more important than ever as we work more remotely and I try and make sure to check in on the rest of the team as often as I can. We take a few minutes each day just to chat through any worries or concerns we have after our meeting, and this seems to keep everybody going in such difficult circumstances.


The team harmony and kindness I see every day certainly helps me personally and reminds me of why I love working in teams - we hope to reconnect with other services face to face as soon as we can. Working in the north community mental health team is certainly a great place to work and I am extremely proud of everyone.


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Best wishes,

Claire
You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2

Friday 8 May 2020

Recovery and restoration


Here's me (top) and
Nihal Fernando (bottom)
Boris is expected to deliver an address to the nation this Sunday to unveil a ‘roadmap’ setting out how the government will "unlock the various parts of the UK economy".

In line with this, we have started working on our own roadmap. Not a roadmap taking us back to where we were before this dramatic detour, but a new roadmap. Yes, the ultimate destination is the same, as our vision and big ambitions have not changed, but this is a route we could never have quite imagined eight weeks ago.

We’re framing this road map as having four phases over the next 18 months or so.

The first phase of ‘Escalation’ was our immediate response to coronavirus as the virus rapidly tore through our nation; this is just finishing as we appear to be over the peak of the pandemic. However, we will need to be mindful that we may need to move back into escalation at any point, if we start to see the virus spreading in a significant way.

We’re now entering the first phase of recovery which is being calling ‘Restore’. This phase over the next six to eight weeks is about restoring critical NHS services that may have been temporarily stepped down at the height of the crisis.  Our acute colleagues have been impacted by this more than us, as we’ve managed to keep our mental health and learning disability services going, albeit in different ways.

But what is important for us during this phase is planning for the increased demand in mental health services we’re anticipating, as the lockdown measures are eased. Plus, we also need to plan during this time for the next phase of recovery - ‘Living with Covid’. Whilst some of the measures will be eased, we won’t be able to return to how things were before, so will need to take social distancing and infection prevention guidelines into account for some time to come.

During the ‘Restore’ phase, we are also intending on undertaking an ‘appreciative enquiry’ with staff and patients about people’s experience over the last few months and how our learning should inform what changes we want to retain going forwards. We want to understand how it’s been for people. What have been the pros and cons for those of you working from home?  What has it been like delivering services in different ways? And how have our service users felt about receiving these services in different ways?

Then, from about July, having done some of this planning in the context of the government’s roadmap, we move into the third phase - ‘Living with Covid’ - which is likely to last right up until the end of this financial year, March 2021. This is about how things stay up and running again whilst keeping people safe and not risking a second peak. So, for example, how do we use Trust HQ during this time? How do we configure our inpatient wards in the context of our plans for single sex accommodation? It’s hard to see how we could run a dormitory-style ward and still meet social distancing measures. And, how should we provide community mental health services and still keep people safe?

The final phase is being called ‘Building Back Better’, which perfectly describes the positive opportunity that this negative crisis has given us. So, from next April, this is about advancing big developments around our use of technology and buildings for example, alongside different ways of working. It will also include our role in the big stuff, such as kick starting the economy and climate change.

So as we enter this next phase, we will be looking at what has worked well and what we might therefore want to ‘lock in’ as our new normal. We’re setting up a recovery group to oversee this work, and they will support other groups, such as the mental health programme board and our corporate leadership group, to lead this work. We will also be working closely with our partners, as it’s essential that there is a consistent approach to recovery.

But this is not just about organisational recovery and restoration. We need to do this as individuals.

It’s essential that we all find ways of restoring our energy. The last few months have been shattering. People have been working really hard. There is an immense psychological impact from this pandemic that will have affected all of us in different ways.

Clinical psychologist Rachel Chin and her team have done some great work on the psychological impact of coronavirus, recognising that people are being affected differently and creating a diagram which explains what people might be feeling. You can see this diagram here.

We all need to find ways of taking a proper break from work to really relax, rather than simply to pause. That means taking annual leave sooner rather than later, even though we can’t go anywhere, as well as any overtime that you may have accrued. Hopping on a plane for a week by the beach feels like a lifetime away, and I appreciate many are therefore reluctant to take time off with so many restrictions in place, but it’s vital to avoid burnout.

And I know this has been really difficult, but when you are working, please take regular breaks. I know this is especially hard for our clinical staff as it has been so full on. I also know lots of people working from home are having back-to-back meetings on Microsoft teams and other digital platforms, which can be exhausting.  The screen freezes. There’s a weird echo. Heads stare at each other. It’s harder to relax into the conversation naturally as you constantly have to remember to switch yourself onto and off mute! No wonder people talk about ‘Zoom fatigue’.

I’ve noticed my migraines have ramped up since I’ve been using Microsoft Teams and Zoom most of the day (and then more of the same to connect with family and friends in the evening). After a weekend of migraines, I took a day off earlier this week and didn’t look at any screens all day. No migraine!

So, please look after yourselves. We will need all of our energy for recovery and should adopt the ‘Building Back Better’ approach for ourselves, as well as our organisation.

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I’ve asked Nihal Fernando, our deputy medical director to say a few words for the guest blog this week. Nihal has experienced this pandemic as a clinical and senior leader. He also spoke at the BAME forum event we held this week, which over 100 staff joined to discuss their experiences, feelings and views on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the forum in the end, which I was really disappointed about, but I’ve been so heartened to hear the positive feedback.

DR NIHAL FERNANDO, DEPUTY MEDICAL DIRECTOR

When I started hearing about the coronavirus numbers from Italy and then Spain, I was seriously worried. I knew we needed to take it seriously and plan for the worst, whilst hoping for the best.

So, yes, I believe our nation should have responded much quicker and much swifter, but I’m sure we’ll all agree that the NHS has made truly heroic efforts within this unprecedented challenge. It’s been our biggest crisis since we were formed in 1948, so we can be forgiven for perhaps not being as co-ordinated and slick as we could have been at the start.

I’ve seen a lot of angst around PPE and felt really frustrated about the message and hold-ups.  I’ve been mindful of the clinical voice and its impact in our response. I’ve also worried about the challenges of social distancing for our staff.

Lives have been turned upside down and it’s been so pressured and fast-moving, with changes sometimes happening every hour. This has been a difficult time. A testing time. But I’ve been so incredibly impressed and proud of the way that our staff and organisation have responded and adapted. We have improved the way we communicate with our staff. It’s not always perfect but we are getting there.

Within the first week of the lockdown we started an 8 week “eMed” training programme via Zoom, set up by the medical education team and the post graduate tutors. The changes and different working practices have carried on coming thick and fast since then.

It is wonderful to see how staff have shown resilience and adaptation in not only picking these up, but also maintaining changes and supporting services for our vulnerable patient group, whilst they themselves were anxious and worried. That is professionalism at its best.

We need to carry on embracing every positive change and take every opportunity, including around recruitment. We had 76 applications for a post we recently advertised. Maybe not a surprise in this current climate, as we’re one of the few employers paying people, but let’s grab this chance to try and fill some critical vacancies.

We’ve had to change styles as well as systems, structures and processes, and so I’ve been trying to live by and share these six points at all times.
  1. People are not ‘working from home’, they are at home during this crisis in order to work
  2. Personal and emotional health are more important than anything else
  3. Don’t over compensate for lost productivity, but accept we are working differently
  4. Be kind to yourself and don’t judge yourself against how others are working
  5. Be kind to others and don’t judge them against how you are coping
  6. Your teams success won’t be measured in the same way as it was when things were normal
It’s not always easy, for example, I felt tired as last week came to an end and after a discussion with my manager, I took some days off to rest and recuperate.

People are getting tired and I worry about that. Not just about those of us on the frontline.

Everyone needs support at this time. Who are supporting the senior managers, including our board members? It is not always easy to appreciate that it is difficult in a different way to not be at the front line, to feel that we are contributing to the benefit of all. Stress comes in different forms in different roles. Everyone’s wellbeing is vitally important.

I know we need to talk about recovery, that’s really important, but we also need to remember that people are still dying. It would be a national scandal if a plane went down killing hundreds, and we’ve had the equivalent of several jumbo jets go down every day for some weeks now.

Recovery feels some distance away, but again it is about thinking and planning the path ahead; I see this road to recovery as a marathon, not a sprint. And I would say we’ve currently done about six miles of the 26.

This coronavirus has also shone a stark spotlight on the issues around BAME inequalities.  It’s an absolute tragedy that more BAME people are falling ill with this virus and dying as it is with any person. BAME staff have played a significant role in the NHS since its inception, and we know that these inequalities have been there from the beginning. It is our duty to look at this. This simply can’t be put on the back burner and forgotten about for another 72 years.

We had over 100 staff attend our BAME forum this week, which shows how important this issue is for our staff. It’s so upsetting and so wrong that BAME staff either don’t feel that they merit or have the same opportunities. This is not just a trust issue, it is part of a wider societal issue. We must keep on pushing forward our equality work and truly recognise the huge benefits that diversity brings; our differences are our strength. It should not be a source of division.

We are all in this together; over 100 different nationalities work in our Trust! This is a gift.

Reflecting on my experiences over the last 6 to 8 weeks, I can honestly say that our four values are being lived like never before: kindness, fairness, ingenuity and determination.

I’ve seen more acts of kindness in the last two months than I’ve seen in the last 12 years of working here. Despite the difficulties and distress, people are smiling more. You can even see their eyes smiling under the masks.

People want to be as fair as they possible can; listening, taking on board other views and sharing. I’ve seen issues being solved and barriers overcome through great innovation as ingenuity shines through. And, in terms of determination, people have just kept going when things have gone awry. They don’t need to be prompted.

Barriers have come down between professionals and people have stepped up to the plate, sometimes where I least expected it.

I truly believe that we are going to be stronger for this experience, as individuals and as a collective. This virus is destructive, but we have started to build, change and learn. This is something that should and will endure in shaping the direction and belief in ourselves and our organisation.

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Best wishes,
Claire
You can follow me on Twitter
@ClaireMolloy2

Friday 1 May 2020

Reimagining the future


It’s been a mixed week emotionally

We have had a few more patient deaths, which is hugely distressing, and the incredibly sad national stories of people losing several close family members to coronavirus have been truly heart-breaking. I can only imagine the gut-wrenching grief and pain.

The one-minute silence on Tuesday gave us all an opportunity to show our deep gratitude and appreciation for those care workers who have lost their lives during the pandemic: it was an immensely moving, but poignant moment.

But amongst the sadness, there are also small chinks of light.

Boris Johnson announced at yesterday’s press conference that the UK is now ‘past the peak’ of this pandemic and, on this week’s regional CEO call, they said that coronavirus hospital admissions in the North West have gone down on eleven out of the last sixteen days. We are also seeing the number of people dying gradually reduce.

The figures offer hope that restrictions may be curbing the spread, even though there remains an understandable atmosphere of apprehension and caution.

Because, even if we are over the worse, we know that our lives are going to be lived in the shadow of this pandemic for some considerable time.

And therein lies the dilemma for leaders: how do we balance an appropriate degree of caution and sensitivity to those affected by it, with the creation of hope and optimism about the future?

Napoleon said, ‘A leader is a dealer in hope’ and leaders need to give hope, especially when people are anxious to hear it and are scared, tired and frustrated. But not false promises, overly optimistic decisions or risky gestures that could lose these hard won gains.

It’s a difficult balance that you can see being played out in the government as they work their way through this dilemma. But it’s one we face, as we turn our thoughts to what a ‘recovery’ strategy might look like.

One thing is for sure, life after lockdown won’t be the same. But we’ve done and learnt so much in these last few months that this is an opportunity to reimagine a different future and ‘lock in’ the positive changes that have been made.  As we know, necessity is the mother of invention.

We have found different ways to engage with people and provide support to our service users, so that overall activity is only down by about 4%. We’ve introduced a range of new digital technologies and remote consultations, as well as new services, such as the 24/7 helpline. We’ve run training and development workshops using new technology and introduced remote working
for over a thousand staff. And whilst doing so cut a lot of the bureaucracy, which will be music to many of our ears!

I know this has energised many teams, who can see more clearly the contribution they are making, and that’s why we shouldn’t just go back to how it was. Many of you have said that you don’t want to lose these new approaches when we enter calmer waters.

As well as keeping the good stuff, we also need to start preparing for the psychological impact of this pandemic. There will no doubt be an increase in demand for mental health services, particularly amongst children and young people, and care workers who have been closest to the stress and trauma of the virus’ impact.

So, we are beginning to think about our plan for recovery and to start reimagining our future, and we want to hear your ideas about what’s worked for you and what you would want to keep as we move forwards.

This awful crisis, despite its very sad and horrible implications in terms of sickness and loss, has galvanised us. It’s drawn us together to see more clearly what we are collectively capable of achieving, and to bring into focus what can be done.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.

This one is no different. It is a portal: a gateway between one way of doing things and the next.

We can choose to walk through it reluctantly holding onto the past or we can walk through lightly ready to imagine another world.

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Amidst the grimness of this pandemic, we’ve seen so much creativity. The constraints seem to have been a trigger for people’s imaginations.

Muhammad Khan, a resident on our Heathfield House rehabilitation unit in Stockport, has been writing a novel during this pandemic. He has also described his experience of being on the unit during the lockdown, and I wanted to share this with you, as I was inspired by the hopeful nature of his story despite everything.

Muhammad Khan


“Things have changed a lot since the lockdown and life on the unit has become harder. Leave has been restricted and activities have stopped. My GCSE exam has been cancelled and staff are now wearing protective personal equipment at all times.

The staff here are caring and understanding. They arrange pool competitions and other activities to keep us entertained. We have a great occupational therapist, who keeps us busy with different activities and whatever our interests are, such as scrabble, cooking or maths.

The hardest thing is not being able to go home to see my family. My family originate from Bangladesh and have been very supportive of me over the years. Visitors aren’t allowed on the ward, but we can use Skype and Facetime to keep in touch with friends and family.

I believe we can all use our free time to do something positive. My religious faith has helped me through many dark times. I pray for myself, my family and friends and all of mankind that we can get through this ordeal.

I have always enjoyed writing, so have used my free time to fulfil my dream and write a novel. I have written the first draft of my book. It is called The Fire Mage and is a fantasy story about a bullied child who grows up to become a great magician.

I hope for the day when I will be able to go home and see all my loved ones again and go out whenever I want, wherever I want.

To read the longer version (700 words), please
click here

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Best wishes

Claire
You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2