Page 23 - QARANC Vol 18 No 2 2020

Department of Community Mental Health (DCMH) Tidworth is known for being the largest, busiest team, caring for many personnel from 3 Division’s front-line combat units and supporting many different headquarters, a diverse and complex patient group. In order to meet demand, Tidworth is staffed at 19 of 27 clinicians and four of four support staff. These staff have always worked hard to meet the patients’ needs but unfortunately in the past there have been several issues that has made their job more difficult. Historically, high staff turnover, infrastructure, gapped posts and high levels of sickness absence have all played a part in increasing workload, work related stress and poor morale. It was deemed important to try and understand what was causing some of these issues and what could be done to improve working conditions.
Initially the focus was on our most important asset, our staff. Staff health and wellbeing is an area often overlooked, therefore a tool was needed to measure the pressures staff were facing and it was decided that the
Military staff DCMH Tidworth
The Gazette QARANC Association 21
Grassroots innovation in the delivery of Mental Healthcare – DCMH Tidworth
Health and Safety Executive audit tool was a good place to start. The tool is an anonymised series of questions based on six domains, which if not correctly managed, are associated with poor health, lower productivity and increased accident and sickness absence rates. The tool was used initially in 2019, lessons learned explored and actioned, then repeated in
2020. The results demonstrate a huge improvement across all six domains (Table 1). This is particularly evident in the relationship’s domain, where no staff reported personal harassment in the form of behaviour or unkind words and in the demands domain, where staff state that despite high workloads the majority of staff feel that they have manageable deadlines, ability to take breaks and are not pressured to work long hours.
Next the focus came to our policies, procedures and methods of working. It was decided that a new, formalised model of working would be needed. In the past much of the responsibility has fallen to the department manager and we realised that this needed to change.
Summary of results