PTSD help for health staff from firm run by ex-Navy surgeon
TRUST WORKERS BEING TRAINED TO SUPPORT THOSE AFFECTED BY CRISIS
DERBY and Burton hospital staff are getting advice on combating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from a company run by a retired Royal Navy Surgeon Captain.
Staff at the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust, along with other key workers, have been through thick and thin over the past 18 months.
In January, the trust said staff were being given PTSD support for the strain and turmoil of combating the Covid-19 pandemic.
NHS organisations across Derbyshire, including the Derby and Burton trust, have reported widespread low morale, exhaustion, stress and burnout among their workforce.
The NHS typically gets a reduction in demand over summer, but this year strain on services reached new heights due to Covid, waiting list backlogs, surging demand in A&E, delayed treatments during lockdown and staff illness.
Now the trust, in a board meeting this week, says it has recruited the help of Professor Neil Greenberg and his company March on Stress to lend trauma support to staff and train them in how to spot and cope with PTSD.
In January, Mr Greenberg, a consultant psychologist and trauma specialist, said the NHS must give staff better “psychological PPE (personal protective equipment)”.
Amanda Rawlings, the director of people and organisational development at the trust, said: “We have been working with a gentleman and his organisation, called Neil Greenberg, who is wellresearched on the impact of traumatic situations on people over a long period of time – so the kind of PTSD.
“We have been using his organisation, his colleagues, to train our colleagues to be able to provide the right interventions and support and to recognise that, actually, over the long term we will have the impact of Covid on our colleagues, the trauma they have seen and the support they are going to need.” Mr Greenberg said in January that, at an individual level, what health and social care staff can control is their own approach to mental wellbeing.
He said they can do this by sharing painful experiences with colleagues and loved ones, creating a “meaningful narrative” for dealing with traumatic cases, and engaging in professional reflective practice sessions – safe spaces in which to open up about internal psychological strain.
Mr Greenberg, who also assisted in staff welfare in the Nightingale hospitals, had compared the psychological situation facing NHS staff to that of an army base he experienced in Iraq – a base that was coming under intense shelling every day.
Ms Rawlings said that the trust has reiterated to staff that they need a break and has taken steps to provide “on-the-ground” support.
She says the trust has given 300 staff the role of wellbeing champion “spotting any changes in behaviour and seeing teams that are struggling and they know where to go to get support”. To date, 5,000 staff have been able to take up the offer of a wellbeing day.
Both Ms Rawlings and Gavin Boyle, chief executive of the trust, have said the organisation is aware that it is “in it for the long haul”. Mr Boyle said: “The summer has been very busy, particularly from an emergency care perspective.”
He said the trust has encouraged staff to take annual leave but “some organisations, perhaps, didn’t take that line, but we always knew that this was a long haul”.
Mr Boyle said: “Clearly there was a degree of reluctance from people to take leave when we are obviously very busy but also because there was a limit in terms of what you could do when you were on leave.
“This summer we did encourage people to take leave and that has presented us with an operational challenge, for exactly that reason, because we know this is going to be a long haul and people need a break.
“I think colleagues have had an opportunity to have a break but, just to be frank, a couple of weeks off work is not in of itself enough to recharge your batteries and to recover from the experiences that many colleagues have had over the past 18 months.”
Dr Kathy McLean, chair of the trust, said: “I think we can all see how pressured the NHS is at the moment. I particularly wanted to say thank you to all of our staff across all of our sites and indeed beyond our organisation for the work they are doing.
“Sometimes we get a bit of a break in the NHS over the summer. I don’t think that’s been the case this year and I think looking forward we have got a very, very busy autumn and winter coming up, due to a combination of things.”
In January, Dr Ian Gell, a trust nonexecutive director, said: “Staff have stepped up to the mark and some are working outside of their areas of comfort. Staff are feeling tired and jaded and that does need to be recognised.
“The pressures on the staff will be long-term and some staff will take a long, long time to recover from the things they’ve had to do and the things they’ve seen in the current situation.”
We have got a very, very busy autumn and winter coming up.
Dr Kathy McLean