SWEETS

Staff Support & Wellbeing Team – SWEETS!

The SWEETS team was established to look at how we could support staff wellbeing during the pandemic. The group was made up of staff from right across the Partnership: ODL, Medics, Spiritual Care, Psychology, AHP’s, Catering, Staff Side, HR, Local Authority, Occupational Health, Clinical Education, Public Health and more! The team had a weekly lunch time meeting on Teams, the ‘highlight of the week’!

Members of the group shared:

“It was great meeting people from all different parts of the org, people who I’d never met before, whose names I knew but didn’t know faces. It was really good to meet up with these people to hear about their challenges, and their work environments and support them to make things better as they supported us to make our parts better”

“It was such an eclectic group, gave such a different perspective. Lent itself to some creative ideas, brainstorming sessions, the group come up with great ideas outside of the box, which if we had been one staff group we probably wouldn’t have come up with”

 Projects:

The ideas from the SWEETS team ranged from small to large scale. We looked at simple staff messages of ensuring we looked after our wellbeing, collating, producing and distributing self help cards and pop up banners to teams & services across the partnership;

Staff Support Cards & Pull Up’s

Liz, from Strategic Planning was deployed to ODL & SWEETS. My role was to pull together the self help information and packs. All different cards with self help information, self management advice, working at home advice, psychological support links and general wellbeing messages.

It seemed such a small thing, and feeling a little bit fraudulent when things were coming in about NHS staff doing this and that and I was sitting in an office and not in the frontline and not dealing with covid on a face to face basis, but I felt I was doing my small part to support the staff who were.

Hearing feedback from staff about what a difference it made to staff, to feel someone was thinking about them. Small things can make a big difference.

Ice Cream!! – see attached

Wobble Rooms & staff Rest areas – see attached

Staff Support Service – see attached

The impact for us being involved in the SWEETS team:

“Being involved was a high point of lock down and my deployment; it was life saving in a world where my job stopped. My role was no longer of value because it wasn’t pertinent, the sweets meetings were the best meetings of the week, the energy, having conversations with likeminded people about joy in work, wellbeing”

“For me, it was a genuinely lovely experience being involved in that type of work. And having a very flat, non hierarchical structure in the group was refreshing”

“With the breadth of experience and knowledge in the group, you just felt you could ask anything and the collective would have come up with an answer; we were valued for our individuality in that group. We had the same end vision, but with different ideas of how to get there but we were all listened to”