Psychological Staff Support in Healthcare : Thinking and Practice

Levels of healthcare staff stress, turnover and sickness absence are deeply damaging our ability to care for those in our communities. This book is relevant for psychologists, psychosocial practitioners, healthcare leaders and those with an interest in staff support and wellbeing in healthcare settings.

This book is relevant for psychologists, psychosocial practitioners, healthcare leaders and those with an interest in staff support and wellbeing in healthcare settings. It showcases a wide variety of work using different psychological approaches, including systemic, psychodynamic, narrative, trauma focused and compassion practices. Psychologists are involved at many different levels in staff support, however it is by no means exclusively their domain; with over forty contributors, this book presents collaborations with many other professionals, including chaplains and colleagues from organizational development, human resources and occupational health, as well as describing how psychological thinking can be applied more broadly to staff wellbeing. The first part of the book introduces key psychological principles and ideas related to psychological staff support. This section discusses how to make equality diversity and inclusion central, presents relational and systemic models applied to the healthcare workforce, and concepts such as moral injury, and looks at how to evaluate the work. The second part focuses on practice and different ways of working with healthcare staff at an individual, team and organisational level. Included here are reflective practice models, the use of EMDR in supporting healthcare staff, debriefs, strategic working and support for senior staff. A key theme emerges throughout the book, which is that no amount of staff support resources and professionals can alone address broader issues such as discrimination and bullying in the workplace, healthcare funding and staff shortage. These, of course, fundamentally affect the wellbeing of staff. Ideas are put forward as to ways wellbeing practitioners may use their influence strategically to work with leadership and organisations to support improvements to working conditions and develop cultures of compassion and inclusivity.