Martyn Souter
Child and Adolescent Mental Health, NHS Lothian
What I learned on the programme is that if you can adapt service developments to a shared team’s values base, it really helps nurses navigate these changes in a way that keeps them motivated and keeps the morale level.
When there are service development changes, from my experience, it’s very much focused on the process of how that’s going to happen and what it’s going to look like. But I feel we’re not always given the time to sit and say, how does this affect our value system? Do we need to look at what we’re being asked to do now and link that up to our team values because that’s obviously going to change.
With the support of the programme and the bursary I was able to put the time in for staff to give them specific CPD and away days around our values as a team and tying that into what we’re currently expected to do as a nursing team. It really helped the morale. It made people feel a lot more engaged in making decisions. We knew what the parameters of our care had to be, but we were able to spend that time thinking about how can we make this work for us? How can we make this work for us in a way that makes us feel good about what we do in the service that we provide. Giving staff the space to contemplate that was really, really important and I saw a difference between my team, who had the time to do that, and other teams that didn’t.