Staff TIME

Time to talk about staff trauma in inpatient mental health.

 

About the project

We know that working on acute mental health inpatient wards can be stressful, and that staff experience violence and verbal abuse, and see patients harming themselves. Staff have also told us that racism, homophobia and abuse targeting disabilities happens a lot.

Staff TIME logoOur experiences and research have told us that staff are not getting the support that they need. People from minoritised groups experience particular difficulties when seeking support.

The Staff TIME project aims to find out what is helpful or unhelpful when seeking support by carrying out interviews with members of staff. This will help us collect information about your experiences on acute inpatient wards and with staff support, and any suggestions you may have to improve staff support.

At the end of the study, we will use the information from the interviews to make recommendations for how mental health wards can reduce the impact of workplace trauma and increase access to support for all staff. These recommendations will be tested in a future study.

 

Nurse treating teenage girl suffering with depression.

 

Who took part?

43 staff members were interviewed who were either currently working on an acute mental health ward, or who had worked on the wards in the past two years.

We recruited from NHS Trusts in Manchester, Lancashire and South Cumbria, Pennine, Merseyside, London, Somerset, and Cornwall. We tried to make sure we also had representation from staff groups who we know had extra difficulty accessing support, including:

  • Staff who identify as Black, Asian, or other diverse ethnic communities
  • Staff who identify as LGBTQIA+
  • Staff who have a disability
  • Staff who identify as neurodiverse
  • Non-clinical staff (such as administrative staff, porters, domestic staff, estates and facilities staff)
  • Bank or agency staff

77% of the staff members we interviewed identified with at least one protected characteristic. We also made sure to recruit a variety of different clinical professions, age groups and genders.

10 senior stakeholders were interviewed from across the country. These were individuals who had a variety of different experience that could help us understand how best to implement staff support on the wars.

This included staff who had experience developing and implementing national policy, providing staff support on acute mental health wards or were equity, diversity and inclusion specialists.

Ward orderly pushing a cleaning trolley.

Smiling male nurse wearing scrubs.

 

What will happen next

We have finished recruitment for the study and are in the process of analysing the interviews.

We held a stakeholder event where we shared our initial findings and discussed strategies of how to implement some of the recommendations. Over 45 people attended the event, including include representatives from NHS England, Royal College of Psychiatry, Royal College of Nursing, Trust senior leadership, staff support providers, staff participants, stakeholder participants, service users and members of our staff advisory group.

We are currently working on completing our analysis, incorporating feedback from our stakeholder event, and writing up these results in academic papers. We will also be producing various other documents (such as an infographic and animation) and sharing our results on social media.

 

Contact us

Contact us for more information, or to be added to our results mailing list.

Kate Allsopp (Project Manager)
Email: kate.allsopp@gmmh.nhs.uk

Emily Harris (Research Assistant)
Email: emily.harris2@gmmh.nhs.uk

Thank you for taking the time to read about our project.

Extra help if you need it

We have compiled a list of organisations who can support you if you feel you need help.

 

Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust logo.