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