One of the Trust’s highest priorities at the moment is our work on staff safety, which addresses both incidents of harm caused to members of our staff team by patients and service users, and also harm caused to staff by other members of staff.
Types of harm include physical violence, discriminatory or hateful words, unwanted or inappropriate sexual behaviour and anything that makes our staff feel uncomfortable or unsafe at work. We are very clear that our staff should be free from the fear of harm at work, and harm can never be dismissed as just “part of the job”.
Our staff safety work has already led to the ‘Report to Support’ initiative and a campaign against discrimination, bullying and harassment within the workplace. We are now continuing to work through the agreed actions of our staff safety programme, which include the formation of a staff safety hub and actions in six other areas – including prevention, a more comprehensive package of support following an incident of harm, and a memorandum of understanding with the police to make it clear when and how they will take action.
We are also planning a poster campaign on our wards to make it clear to patients, families and carers that our staff have the right to provide care safely and that we will take action when there is an incident of harm.
We will share more updates about this important area of work in subsequent editions of Better Together.
