5 minute read
COVID – telling our stories
ON THE ANXIETIES OF STAFF AND SUPPORTING EACH OTHER “Everyone was absolutely consumed with COVID and talking about how bad it was, what was the next shift going to bring.”
Research tries to make sense and learn from staff experience of the pandemic
As the gravity and enormity of the pandemic experience on health sta was emerging, a group of sta from the HSE and an academic researcher from UCD came together to try and make sense of and learn from sta experience of the pandemic.
It all started in March 2020 with a call from Dr John Fitzsimons, Paediatrician and Clinical Director for Quality and Patient Safety, for sta to share ideas to help inspire, replenish, and care for each other in the face of the challenges ahead.
Early examples of local adaptations and changes in ways of working, and stories of sta putting their values into action, demonstrated how sta were already responding, adapting, and leading with compassion, trust, and bravery to ensure the continued safe delivery of care during the pandemic. The opportunity was identified to capture and understand these examples of excellence and learn from them.
HSE sta from Quality & Patient Safety, Values in Action, Sta Engagement and Communications partnered with researchers from University College Dublin to understand the experiences of healthcare sta during this time.
“Everything was so uncertain. I picked up my phone and headed down to the beach, I wanted to record a message to my colleagues in the health care worker community. I wanted to ask them to tell their stories to each other and connect because this virus had forced us to interact and deliver care in di erent ways,” explained Dr Fitzsimons.
“I hoped that by seeing each other through our stories, examples and successes, it would give us the strength we would need to persevere, continue to deliver excellent care for the public, show compassion to each other and learn from each other’s extraordinary e orts.”
ON COLLECTIVE WAYS OF WORKING AS A TEAM:
With the aim of representing the hard realities of healthcare delivery in Ireland throughout the pandemic, we wanted to hear stories of change and adaptation, capturing the real human experiences and anxieties of healthcare sta , as well as their many achievements.
By doing this, we aim to support the future proofing of health services, and to help inform how we can support sta to drive change that will improve patient and sta experience and quality of care.
Through social media and submissions to Health Matters, we reached out to ask people to share their stories of excellence, care, compassion, kindness, trust, leadership, bravery and learning in their work and in their teams. Zuneera Khurshid, a PhD scholar working across the HSE and the UCD team, conducted interviews to gather further information. Based on this work, a number of key findings
ON COVID-19 FORCING RAPID CHANGE IN THE SYSTEM: “I felt like it accelerated my vision of the service. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly but COVID kind of made us do it very fast.”
emerged, highlighting how sta supported each other and used coping mechanisms to deal with the stress and anxiety of the pandemic. Working collaboratively in teams, sta were empowered to implement co-designed, innovative ideas which accelerated the implementation of change and improved sta confidence. Reflecting on their experiences, sta appreciated this new and collective way of working and were keen to explore how best to preserve the learning.
Sta employed a person-centred, values-based approach to deliver care in an environment safe for patients and sta . Not only did the pandemic accelerate the pace of change, it helped to facilitate it by introducing sta to a new, flexible, and less hierarchical way of working, removing many of the barriers traditionally faced by healthcare teams.
“I felt like it accelerated my vision of the service. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly but COVID kind of made us do it very fast.”
“Nobody had done this before, so we were all starting out together. So, it kind of got rid of that hierarchy and the traditional levels within the organisation.”
We found that this storytelling approach was a valuable way to unpack the complex experiences of healthcare sta during this period. This allowed us to explore the anxieties, stresses and challenges experienced, and to examine how sta leveraged the support and expertise of their peers to deliver high quality, safe patient care. “It was really important to be able to sort of show humility and admit to when I wasn’t feeling okay or when I felt overwhelmed… looking out for each other has become much more embedded in what we do on a day-to-day basis.”
Although these stories are just some of the many examples of the extraordinary response of the Irish healthcare system, they demonstrate the importance of hearing sta voices, and highlight storytelling and narrative research as key tools for healthcare leaders and organisations to learn from sta experiences during the pandemic.
“The original sta are gone back to their teams so they’ve taken the learning stu back you know from the testing service back, to their own teams and said look because this is the way we did it before why can’t we try this and we found this really helpful.”
“We will look back at this, regardless of what stage of your career, you are and really see that - oh my goodness, it was such a time of challenge, opportunity, and learning.”
What’s next?
We would like to thank those sta who shared their stories with us. We are hoping to continue to collect stories of experiences and are particularly interested in stories relevant to sustained improvements and sta resilience when implementing change. Please email aoife.debrun@ucd.ie if you are interested in taking part in a brief interview.
A more detailed discussion of our findings is available via a HSE QPS TalkTime webinar:
https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/qid/ resourcespublications/qi-talktime/
Further information on this research is available here:
https://tinyurl.com/Sta ExperiencesOfChange
