Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) is committed to ensuring a culture in which employees and service users are treated in a reasonable, supportive, fair and effective manner, to encourage personal conduct and performance at work and to ensure high quality services, which safeguard all service users and colleagues.
At AWP, we are making a stand for kindness and respect against all forms of abuse, aggression or threatening behaviour. We developed the How you speak to me, sticks with me campaign to capture the affect that words can have on staff and service users. Emphasising that both positive and negative language not only affects service users and staff during their work day, but they can carry it with them into their personal lives too, ultimately affecting their mental health and wellbeing. This campaign supports our Trust values, Be a Great Place to Work and to Provide Outstanding Care.
Julian Feasby, Director for People says: "A really important part of helping AWP to be a Great Place to Work is working towards clear, expected behaviours, including the way we interact with each other and our service users. This could be as simple as a ‘good morning’ when you arrive at work, or allowing yourself time to be calm before interacting in a way that might affect a colleague. It also means developing a positive atmosphere within AWP which includes transparent and open conversation with colleagues, service users and family members and making sure they know our staff expect the same back. The “How you speak to me, sticks with me” campaign is a great example of this because it moves us towards our staff feeling supported and safer, and acts as a reminder to anyone entering our Trust sites that their language can have a long lasting effect.”
Mark Earl, AWP Safewards Lead says: "Words are our tools and means for recovery and healing, so how a service user is spoken too and how they are heard and understood is our focus every working day. A large part of developing the Safewards interventions is about the willingness to improve as a practitioner and to adapt our working approach so that we can establish a working dialogue with every service user which speaks to their needs and experience. Self-awareness and improvement around how we communicate verbally is to be encouraged in our professional and clinical relationships as this means we always aspire to be empathic and personable in creating therapeutic relationships which sustain long-term outcomes for service users. Good verbal communication is the litmus test for good care."
Sarah McKeever, Ward Manager says: "People think they can speak to each other in any manner they want without realising that this stays with them and can be really hurtful. We all want to be spoken to in a respectful, kind and caring way so it is essential we all role model this. If people speak in a negative way the other person is more likely to become defensive and not hear what you are trying to say. This does not help to build future working relationships. Too often people speak from emotions and don’t think about how those emotions then project onto the person you are speaking to or at. Those feelings stay with that other person and will naturally impact how they approach you in future and not for the better."
