Work and wellbeing: Individual and team development
Event overview
As part of the celebration of our first 100 years, we will host two connected events exploring the Trust’s contribution to education and training and its legacy. This is the first of two sessions in a series of events exploring mental wellbeing at work and examining what circumstances enable individuals, groups, organisation and systems to thrive. The sessions will be co-chaired by Brian Rock, Postgraduate Dean and Director of Education and Training and Chris Caldwell, Director of Nursing and System Workforce Development who will host organisational consultants Helen Shaw and Charlotte Williams. Session two will focus on organisations and systems.
Our mission today remains true to our founding mission ‘to help, to understand more and to teach our work.’ From training individual learners, to organisations systemically, we will describe the contribution that the Tavistock and Portman has pioneered in learning and teaching and its contribution to the wellbeing of the health and care workforce.
Our approach develops capabilities and fosters confidence that equip students and practitioners to make thoughtful and relevant contributions to their work in health, mental health, social care, education and criminal justice. We encourage our learners to recognise their feelings, connect with the dynamics of relationships, and to learn how to work with emotions and use theoretical constructs, how to hold complexity and uncertainty, and how to operate in groups and multi-disciplinary teams to meet the emotional and psychological needs of the people we strive to help.
We are at the forefront of workforce transformation within mental health – both training people to deliver mental health services and in ensuring the mental health of the whole health and care workforce. We offer assessment and design and delivery of interventions to support small and medium sized businesses to address worker mental health and psychological wellbeing. Within health and care we have led the establishment of a system-wide approach to supporting worker mental health and wellbeing in response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Session one - Individual and team development
We enable practitioners to understand themselves as leaders and the impact their work has on them and they on it. Rooting the session in the Trust’s experience as an education provider, we will engage our speakers in their own stories about the challenges delivering mental health care. Our speakers will reflect on their personal and professional development. We will end by bringing a contemporary lens to explore current applications of our theory and practice and future possibilities, as we widen participation in our student cohort and reach beyond our core student constituencies.
This session will aim to enable participants to join the panel in reflecting on the experience of being in work and to think about the core requirements of the workplace and the individual to enable people to continue to thrive in work, even under difficult circumstances. This session will connect our long experience of supporting individual learners and teams with our work with organisations and the wider system through a common thread of reflective practice.
Bev Thomas will explore the different reflective practice sessions she runs as an Organisational Consultant. Some of these are initiated following a work crisis, others as ongoing support to a team to facilitate reflection on the complexities of work. She will draw on her experience working fortnightly with a front-line team during the pandemic, which she has found interesting and challenging. She will also focus on individual leadership coaching and other forms of swell-being coaching.
There will be a unique opportunity to draw on all of our experiences and challenges together with the particular issues of delivering health and mental health care and social care through the pandemic.
This talk will appeal to people working in the NHS and care sector, education, and more widely in the public sector, with an interest in their own wellbeing and the mental health of the people who are at the centre of their service provision. It will also appeal to leaders from any sector who are keen to improve the wellbeing of their staff, teams and organisations. All welcome. Please note that the timing of this talk is subject to change.
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Speaker biography
CHRIS CALDWELL is Executive Director of Nursing and System Workforce Transformation at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London. Chris is also Chief Nurse for North London Partners in Health and Care Integrated Care System where she is Senior Responsible Officer for staff wellbeing and provides strategic oversight of the North London Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub. Chris chairs the Cavendish Square Group London Mental Health Nurse Directors’ Forum. Chris also led the establishment of CapitalNurse, London’s programme of collective action to grow and sustain nursing across the capital and continues to sit on the programme board.
Chris is a registered nurse (adults and children) with Masters level education in Health Psychology and Health Care Education. She holds a Doctorate from Ashridge Business School focusing on transformational organisational change. Chris is passionate about applying relational and creative approaches to system leadership to achieve sustainable transformation through collective action to drive improvements in health and care to reduce inequalities and improve population health. She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at City, University of London and London South Bank University.
BRIAN ROCK took up his role as Director of Education & Training / Dean of Postgraduate Studies in January 2015. After qualifying as a clinical psychologist, before moving to London, Brian worked for the Goldstone Commission that was set up to examine political violence around the transition to democratic rule in 1994 in South Africa. This led to him being appointed as the founding director of an NGO, The Children’s Inquiry Trust. He has worked in the NHS since 1996 and was appointed as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in 2004. Brian has worked in different roles in the organisation and has been involved in delivering training and supervision for a number of courses for the Trust and elsewhere. Since July 2009, Brian was involved in setting up and overseeing primary care services for the Trust, most notably with our award winning City & Hackney Psychotherapy Consultation Service. He has been involved in developing and delivering training and consultation to GPs and primary care staff.
Brian is a psychoanalyst and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He also has an MBA from Henley Business School. Brian has published and presented widely on various topics related to mental health, Medically Unexplained Symptoms, and service development and service evaluation in primary care.
Brian is a Board Trustee for Student Minds, a national charity focussed on mental health and wellbeing for students in Higher Education, and for Independent Higher Education (IHE), a membership body for alternative education providers.
During his role Brian has led a number of key developments in education & training including the launch of the Digital Academy in Sept 2020 and the successful registration as a formal Higher Education institution with the Office for Students.
CLAIRE SHAW is a Consultant Nurse, working in the Adult and Forensic Services at the Tavistock Centre. Claire has been involved in developing and providing training to nurses and allied health professionals throughout her career, using an applied psychodynamic framework to explore and understand the impact of healthcare work. She has a particular interest in developing reflective spaces and using an applied psychodynamic model to enable clinicians to better understand their patients, their experience at work and the factors influencing this. Claire is a mental health nurse with a Masters in Institutional and Community Care and recently undertook the Interdisciplinary Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock.
HELEN SHAW is Portfolio Manager for Educational Psychology, Social Care, Leadership and Management at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and responsible for both long and short courses. She is also a an organisational consultant, coach and researcher who works with individuals, teams and organisations. She is former Co-Director of the charity Inquest.
For 21 years she was co-director of INQUEST a voluntary sector organisation that works on legislative, policy and practice change in relation to deaths in state detention and their investigation. With both leadership and board level experience in the not-for profit and public sectors she supports open and collaborative working cultures where diversity and complexity can be embraced and is passionate about confronting discrimination. She is an associate consultant at Tavistock Consulting and the Skills for Health/Workforce Development Trust.
CHARLOTTE WILLIAMS is an organisational consultant at Tavistock Consulting. She brings twenty years of experience working as a clinician and leader in Higher Education. In her current role at Tavistock Consulting, she provides consultancy and coaching to leaders and teams, alongside developing and delivering leadership training. She has been supporting and working with leaders and teams across sectors during the pandemic and produced an article and webinar around the importance of increasing containment for staff and students in Higher Education during the COVID crises. Charlotte teaches on the Masters in Leading and Consulting in organisations and has previously taught on counselling courses. She is a BACP accredited counsellor, and an EMCC accredited coach. She is one of the few Welsh speaking organisational consultants in the UK and is often invited to speak in Welsh on programmes broadcast by BBC Radio Cymru discussing matters around mental health and wellbeing.
For 100 years, the Tavistock and Portman has proudly been at the forefront of exploring mental health and wellbeing. From attachment theory and infant observation, to applying psychoanalytic and systemic approaches in varied settings, our ideas have led to changes in care, education, how organisations work and beyond.
Our Centenary Festival is celebrating our history and exploring contemporary issues in relation to identity, relationships and society. It is considering how we continue to draw on our heritage to provide valuable responses to contemporary and future problems from the perspective of equality and inclusion.
