Organisations across the UK and
beyond are set to benefit from a unique NHS- academic partnership which sees a
focus on staff safety and morale – and delivers significant cost savings.
Together
Northumbria University and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust are pioneering
professional development courses on Restorative Just Culture. This approach at
the Liverpool-based Trust has seen reduced dismissals and suspensions, leading
to substantial business savings, and has generated great interest across the
health sector.
Starting in
2016 Mersey Care has worked to deliver a Restorative Just Culture. And despite
increasing its workforce by 135%, the Trust has since seen an 85% reduction in
disciplinary investigations and a 95% reduction in suspensions – helping them
drive down costs significantly. During
the same period, it has also seen improved staff engagement and safety culture
scores as measured by the NHS national staff survey.
Mersey
Care’s Executive Director of Workforce Amanda Oates says: “Mersey Care started
on our journey towards a Restorative Just and Learning Culture after
conversations with our staff about the barriers staff faced delivering the best
care that they could possibly give.
“The
feedback was overwhelmingly about the fear of blame if something didn't go as
expected. This was preventing staff from telling us what wasn’t working. More
importantly, it was preventing the opportunity for learning from those things
to prevent them from happening again. As a Board, we had the conversation - are
we looking at problems the wrong way?”
Seeing
benefits to staff and its delivery of care, Mersey Care sought out academic
expertise from Northumbria University to create an accredited course that
enables other NHS trusts and indeed other types of organisations to establish a
Restorative Just Culture too.
What is Restorative Just Culture?
Restorative
Justice is an approach favoured by distinguished academic Professor Sidney
Dekker of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. It works to replace a
culture of blame and fear with a culture of trust, learning and accountability.
It
recognises the welfare of a range of stakeholders such as employees, patients
and clients, where an employee relations matter has arisen. These matters could
include bullying, harassment, grievances, disciplinaries or an adverse event.
The
Restorative Just Culture approach deals with adverse events and incidents by
asking, who is hurt; what do they need; and whose obligation is it to meet
those needs? In turn, this builds teams
that feel psychologically safe to speak out, take interpersonal risks and, in a
healthcare setting, make decisions to provide safe and continuous care without
fear of retribution or marginalisation.
A transformative learning programme
The new
four-day programme teaches the theory behind Restorative Just Culture and its
application in complex organisations. Any professionals and practitioners who
are involved in the management and welfare of a range of stakeholders in any
industry will benefit from it.
It aims to
teach learners how to manage these issues in a restorative way that minimises
the negative impacts, maximises the learning and develops an organisational
culture where people feel safe.
In his
powerful film about Mersey Care’s journey, Professor Sidney Dekker says: “An
incident is something that you have already invested in – what you need to do
is to get a return on that investment. A restorative just culture allows you to
get that return, to learn from it, to not send people away who are involved in
it because they are the embodiment of the really expensive lesson that you’re
not learning. A single organisation that gets this is really hard to find. Look
at Mersey Care! Look at what these people are doing!”
Northumbria
Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Management and Restorative Just Culture
Programme Leader, Kristina Brown, believes that the benefits that Mersey Care
has seen are possible for any organisation that is prepared to implement a
Restorative Just Culture: “There is a growing body of evidence linking staff
wellbeing and negative workforce factors to levels of team effectiveness and
the quality of care that a patient will receive,” she explains. A recent NHS Patient Safety Strategy
highlighted the cost to patient safety resulting from healthcare teams that do
not feel supported to carry out patient care, estimating that 11,000 lives go
unsaved and a further £1 billion is spent on treatment following unnecessary
incidents.
“Healthcare
professionals are central to these efforts and managing relations that have
arisen from any event in the restorative approaches of compassion, civility and
respect is crucial not only for patient safety but a health worker’s physical
and psychological wellbeing.”
High praise and collaborations
After a
successful pilot course in June, the programme has been highly praised by
Trusts throughout the UK, who have also seen reductions in suspensions,
investigations and disciplinaries and have witnessed the impact that managing
relations with compassion, civility and respect has had to people’s lives.
Now the
programme has been highlighted in the We
are the NHS: People Plan 2020/21-action for us all and is being showcased
by the NHS Employers, the Public Service People Managers Association and the
CIPD from October 2020 onwards.
Such has
been the success of the programme that the UK’s ZeroSuicide Alliance is
also utilising it to help support and facilitate the work they are doing to
prevent suicide in the UK and beyond.
Available
for organisational or combined organisational bookings for up to 40 delegates,
the programme is delivered by experts from Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and
Northumbria University.
The course is
delivered remotely as a fully interactive digital programme, with some dates
already being fully booked for 2020/21 and further courses already being
launched from summer 2021 onwards. The programme is taught in 4 days over a three-week
period and is also
supported with a live Q&A session and post programme action learning set.
For available
dates and bookings for 2020/21, please contact Kristina Brown: kristina.brown@northumbria.ac.uk
Three free online
learning modules can also be found by visiting our Restorative Just Culture course page.
