March On Stress

Supporting the NHS through the coronavirus crisis

Added on the 14th May 2020

March on Stress made its way into the news this week – with the BBC covering the work we are doing with NHS Trusts to support staff.

March on Stress Director, Professor Neil Greenberg, explains: “We have been working with a number of NHS organisations to help them to ensure that they can implement a range of evidence based psychological support initiatives in order to help protect the mental health of their staff.

“We are delighted to have been asked to help roll out training to supervisors which will help them carry out psychologically savvy supportive conversations with their team. There is a great deal of evidence showing that supervisors have a critical role to play in supporting their team’s mental health and the training we are providing NHS Trusts aims to help improve supervisors confidence to have those important conversations.

“We are also helping to deliver and implement Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) peer support which is also a highly evidence based approach to protect staff’s mental health.

“TRiM was first used in the British Military more than 20 years ago and since has been used by a wide range of organisations including the emergency services, media organisations and the health service.

“The TRiM programme has been the subject of a considerable amount of research much of which has been carried out by King’s College London. It is wholly compliant with the NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) traumatic stress guidelines in that it is a way of actively monitoring trauma-exposed staff, ensuring they get the right support at work and also assisting those who need professional support to access it.

“We are very pleased to be working with NHS Trusts during the current COVID19 crisis.”

One such trust is Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust. Chief Executive, Toby Lewis, said: “The Trust is focused on the current and future psychological wellbeing of our teams. We have a local comprehensive wellbeing offer in place, as well as making use of wider regional and national mental health support. Learning from Italy and elsewhere we have put in place dedicated COVID-19 arrangements to provide additional support for departments.

“Mental health first aid support will be in place in the most affected departments, over 700 team leaders are being trained in additional support skills to work with those they manage in a psychologically astute way at this challenging time, and we want to offer a specific support programme for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We worked with healthcare and military colleagues to consider what would be most appropriate. From that has come a partnership with March on Stress. Their help is focused on delivering more advanced training in Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) which is a trauma-focused peer support system designed to help people who have experienced a traumatic, or potentially traumatic, event. This will be important as we come through the recovery and restoration phase to help people come to terms with their experiences.”

Read the BBC coverage here.

For more information on how we can help your organisation during the current crisis and beyond, please contact us at info@marchonstress.com.

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