We offer a staff support service for anyone employed by LWH who is experiencing difficulties related to their work. The support we offer is confidential and is available face to face, by telephone or remotely. We operate mainly between the hours of 8.30am – 5pm but we can offer some flexibility with appointments up until 8pm if needed. Please note we do not offer crisis support.
Trauma informed psychological support
This service is available to support staff with the emotional and psychological demands of their role, recognising the potential impact these demands may have on both personal and professional lives.
It is recognised that whilst not all serious events will be experienced as traumatic by staff, and some events with good outcomes can have felt traumatic, the development of trauma and stress responses will be different for different people due to several factors.
The service will offer access to evidence based psychological therapies for staff, support, and training and workshops around the potential impact of trauma. These will enable greater awareness of workplace trauma exposure, better understanding of how trauma responses develop and how to help oneself and colleagues.
The trauma informed service is a specialist service which sits within the wellbeing service.
Health and Well-being Coaches
As part of the staff support service, we offer a range of interventions within midwifery to support staff psychological, emotional, and physical health and wellbeing. Our Health & Wellbeing coaches work collaboratively with the PMA’s and mental health first aiders to offer support, guidance, and advice.
Our Health and Wellbeing coaches are able to offer the following interventions:
- Listening ear sessions: – A one off, non-directive space for staff to seek support. The aim is for staff to have a quickly and easily accessible confidential space to be heard and validated.
- Health and Wellbeing conversations: – More structured conversation which aims to be holistic in its approach to identify an individual’s needs and may lead to identifying some goals around physical, emotional and/or psychological health. The health and wellbeing coach can then offer some 1:1 sessions to work towards achieving goals and/or signposting to additional services where appropriate.
- Support for staff on long term sick or those returning to work – Will need to be referred by HR but you can choose to opt out of Health and Wellbeing support.
- Support for staff involved in investigations – Managers will recommend a referral into the service, but staff can choose if they would like to opt in.
Outside of midwifery and for the wider trust, the Health & Wellbeing coaches will also work closely with the PNA’s and mental health first aiders to offer support, guidance and advice.
How to refer
Come and talk to us in whichever way suits you; drop in, email, or referral form. We aim to be easily accessible and are based in the Occupational Health Department.
You can self-refer, refer a colleague, or be referred on behalf of a colleague (although we would expect that if you are referring on a colleague’s behalf that you have already sought prior consent). You can find our referral form here https://forms.office.com/e/XYCRmaxBpp or via the ‘staff support’ icon on your desktop.
You can email us; staffsupport@lwh.nhs.uk with a brief description of what is being requested (i.e. one to one work, teaching, support for a team) and your contact details.
We aim to respond to your request within 3 working days (Monday - Friday 9am-5pm).
What to expect from our service
You will be contacted by someone from the staff support team to be booked in for a triage call, which will last approximately 15 minutes and will be a chance for us to find out together how best to support you. The triage call will be with a member of the staff support team and is confidential. At the end of that appointment, we will discuss how best to support you.
What data do we collect and how to do we use it
The service we provide is confidential, unless there are significant risk issues, in which case we would discuss with you in person to decide together about who and how to share this information with.
We collect routine data on; no of contacts to our service, input offered, outcome measures, and your experiences of using our service. This is anonymised data and kept on a password protected document, which is only accessible to the clinical team. This data is used to evaluate our service and improve service delivery.