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