The new guide is designed to encourage hospice leaders to develop a more strategic approach to supporting their workforce. It encourages them to identify, in good time, whether staff are stressed and, if so, introduce measures to reduce this, increase resilience and promote well-being in the workplace.
This important resource was developed, in part, as a response to the findings of the Commission into the Future of Hospice Care, which explicitly acknowledged that the wellbeing of clinical staff is a vital component in an organisation’s ambition to deliver high-quality, sustainable care in increasingly challenging times.
The launch event on Monday evening, chaired by Dr Ros Taylor, included compelling presentations from three experts in the field; Dame Barbara Monroe, formerly chief executive of St Christopher’s Hospice, Jessica Pryce-Jones, CEO of iOpener and author of ‘Happiness at work’, and Dr Jocelyn Cornwell, chief executive of The Point of Care Foundation – the organisation commissioned to produce the resource.
Resilience will help see hospices through changes
Dame Barbara spoke about how resilience at the individual and organisational level, when working together, has the capacity to see hospices through the changes in the coming decade. She shared, from her comprehensive research into the subject and her experience as a leader, a range of strategies she has deployed in her efforts to build resilience, and candidly reflected on their degree of success.
Dame Barbara outlined some key factors which support individual and team resilience:
- For each person to have a coherent narrative of their work, in order to ‘make sense’ of the nature and impact of such work.
- For work to be validated by leaders within the organisation.
- To have time to reflect in a safe and supportive environment.
- The need for strong and empathic leadership across the whole organisation to build resilience at scale.
Resilience sometimes means asking for help
Jessica Pryce-Jones opened her session by a short interactive exercise with the audience, which illustrated the power of language and how adopting positive and negative terminology impacts on our and others energy level.
Jess offered several useful strategies to build resilience, including re-framing ones perspective of a situation. The objective here is not to deny or trivialise the challenge but enable alternative options to be considered.
She also highlighted the importance of paying attention to one’s work and emotional capacity and employing ‘proactive coping’ by planning ahead and thinking “…what if?”
A very salient point made by Jess was that one’s resilience, or lack thereof, is very often dependent on the task in hand. We all feel stressed or less resilient when dealing with certain demands or tasks, and she reassured us that a healthy approach at such times is to ask for help!
The resilience of staff impacts on the quality of care
Dr Jocelyn Cornwell cited very sobering evidence on the current level of stress experienced by NHS staff and how, increasingly, research confirms that the health and well-being of front-line staff determines the quality of patient care.
The purpose of the new resource launched this week is to create awareness of such findings and share the evidence of what can be done to mitigate such an impact on staff working in the hospice sector.
Two key findings suggest that hospice staff do experience stress, but that the hospice environment appears protective. And, although it is recognised that staff stress is associated with the nature of the work (dealing with suffering, death and dying on a daily basis) a more important factor noted by staff is poor management and systems of work.
This resource, informed by the best available evidence, provides a framework to help hospice leaders to consider a range of interventions and a check-list to plan and monitor their progress, both in the prevention of stress and in supporting staff when working in stressful times.
Dr Ros Taylor, Dame Barbara and Jess Pryce-Jones all heartily commended the report to all those in leadership within the hospice sector.
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