Martyn Souter
CAMHS Lead Nurse, NHS Forth Valley
FoNS Inspire Improvement Fellow talks about leading with values
What I learned on the Inspire Improvement programme was that if you can adapt service developments to a team’s shared values base, it really helps nurses to navigate developments and changes in a way that maintains their motivation and morale.
From my experience, when there are service developments and other changes, we often focus on the process of how that’s going to happen and what it’s going to look like. But I feel we’re not always given the time to sit and say, “how does this affect our value system? Do we need to look at what we’re being asked to do now and link that up to our team values because that’s obviously going to change?”
With the support of the programme and the bursary I was able to put the time in for staff to give them specific CPD and away days focused on our individual and shared team values. We then tied those into the care we were expected to provide as a nursing and multi-disciplinary team. I felt it really helped their morale. It made people feel a lot more engaged in making decisions. We knew what the parameters of our care had to be, but we were able to spend time thinking about how we could make this work for us and our values – how we could make this work for us in a way that makes us feel good about what we do and the care that we provide: Giving staff the space to contemplate that was really, really important, and I felt a difference being in a team who had the time to do that, from other teams where I hadn’t been afforded the opportunity.