Support for NHS staff traumatised by the pandemic
Training NHS staff to be able to support their colleagues through the impact of the pandemic.
County Durham, England
Funding from NHS Charities Together enabled County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust Charity to train 53 staff volunteers.
NHS staff faced relentless pressures throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, from concerns about passing the virus on, to saying goodbye to patients and colleagues.
The TRiM service at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust gave its staff the support they needed to keep going.
More commonly used by the military, TRiM stands for Trauma Risk Management and enables staff to support each other through challenging times, preventing mental health issues from worsening into extreme trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
When seeing the impact that the pandemic had on her team started to impact her own wellbeing, Ward Manager Angela reached out to the service. She said:
“It was very difficult coming out of Covid to go and find myself as a manager again. What I didn’t realise at the time was what the whole experience would leave me with, which is why I reached out to TRiM. Through a lot of reflection I kind of realised that I was angry, very angry.
“I’d become very ill through Covid, it had left me with a lot of health problems. But it had left my team with a lot of health problems as well. So that anger just manifested and manifested.
“We’d had debriefs and the Mental Health Service provided really good support to our team, but I just didn’t feel like there was anywhere to go. And it was literally eating me up.
“[The TRiM service] was absolutely fantastic for me and I just felt that I’d unloaded everything. And I didn’t need any answers because I knew the answers, I just needed somebody to listen to me and just sort of say right, okay, everything’s fine, you are in a good place.
“That is what I needed and that’s exactly what I got. And then we sort of turned the ward round and then became back to what we should have been, which was dealing with our complex frail patients. A lot of this had been about rebuilding after Covid. So that’s what we did.”
Watch the video below to learn more.
