Dignissim suspendisse blandit ut sit ultricies.

About this event

Working in the NHS can be stressful. According to a 2016 ‘Guardian’ survey of NHS staff, 43% of NHS health care workers surveyed identified feeling unreasonably stressed at work ‘most’ or ‘all of the time’. In 2013 the ONS found that the NHS had higher sickness absence rates than any other large public sector organisation, with 3.4% of worker hours lost to sickness. Sickness absence costs the NHS £2.4bn a year - accounting for around £1 in every £40 of the total budget.

NHS Employers estimate 30% of this sickness time is caused by stress. It’s important to frame this in the context of what is currently the biggest sustained fall in NHS spending in any period since 1951. While NHS funding is getting tighter, demand for NHS services and costs for new medical treatments are increasing and other cut backs that impact the NHS have been deepening.

The NHS could be characterised as an increasingly unworkable system that relies on the good will of staff who accept over-work as the price to pay for survival – and that is innately stressful. There is now significant evidence to show that when staff are feeling persistently threatened with overwhelming workloads their ability to meet patients’ care needs – as well as their own needs for self-care – with empathy and compassion is compromised. If the ‘threat’ mode is maintained for long enough it becomes the norm and part of the team and/or organisational culture and this can have a significant negative impact on personal resilience.

Resilience training is seen as one of the solutions to this very difficult situation. One of the dangers of this is that such training could be viewed (and even used) as a way to avoid the obvious organisational and structural issues and locate the problem of stress in the individual.

This one-day course – ‘Resilience for trainee doctors’ – seeks to address the multifaceted problem of stress in the NHS workplace head-on, using the concept of ‘relational intelligence’ to help course participants see more clearly the causes of stress – the ways in which they relate to them¬selves, their colleagues and their teams/ organisations. The objective of the day is to develop a comprehensive ‘resilience plan’ to equip participants with the tools and practices necessary to survive and thrive in the NHS today.