Large London NHS Trust

Commission

FOL were approached by this trust to help senior managers deal with the pressures caused by the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. 

The Chief Operating Officer contacted Fields of Learning on 26th March 20 to request targeted and specific support for 5 teams that she felt would be under extraordinary pressure as they led responses to Covid-19 events.  The COO felt it was important that this was external support as internally people would be stretched to capacity both clinically and in terms of looking after the rapid changes required to be delivered. Each team would have a dedicated Fields of Learning team coach and 30 hours of input.

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Key aims

•    provide each team member a

personal psychologically safe space to

help manage stress and maintain

perspective through the crisis 
•    support the team leaders to lead

compassionately and effectively

through the crisis
•    support the team leader with

practical virtual facilitation of their

team to help build collective resilience

and ensure effective team dynamics. 

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Our support

FOL provided a mixture of support across the 5 teams, which was bespoke to their particular need and was informed by the differing states of the teams' development. An example from one team was 1:1 elective coaching for 7 of the 9 team members who requested it – this support was on an on-call basis during the height of the crisis and used regularly by several to have a listening ear and space for managing emotions and gaining improved perspective.  There were also scheduled coaching sessions with the manager to support her team leadership and her facilitation of team reflections. Other teams were supported with specific input from our facilitators on key topics of resilience training after doing diagnostic work with the team. 

 

Themes arising

Individual
o    Managing state in the moment
o    Building Resilience 
o    Self-awareness
o    Career ideas development – what’s next after COVID?

The team
o    Managing team impact during the crisis
o    Building team resilience 
o    All teams have issues – none are perfect, but those

who take time to talk / reflect / address issues together

at a team dynamic level as well as at an operations

response level have more success. 

 

Feedback & Outcome

•    Excellent support with high impact on the Directors

and Core Team.
•    Very thought provoking.
•    Challenging but in an appropriate and supportive

manner.
•    Well led with insight.
•    Interactive which was helpful.
•    Use of tools and different techniques was really good.

 

What they said:

"In summary, I personally found both our sessions extremely good and gave us what we really needed; the ability to look inwards and challenge amongst ourselves, ability and time to focus on our priorities and vision and how we might get there.  Focus on resilience was very useful and thought provoking." CEO - NHS team