THE LOOP
You may have seen recent suggestions that NHS staff should be offered military style ‘decompression’ to help them deal with their experiences of the national COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, our own Roy Lilly recently offered his views on the topic in his NHS Managers blog. In times of national crisis, it is not surprising that some parallels are drawn with the military and military operations – it probably helps convey
the threat, scale, and extremity of the situation. Looking for comparators and examples of best practice in other organisations to help us get through a crisis makes complete sense; however, these comparisons are not always helpful or relevant because the organisations and the challenges are not necessarily comparable. For a start, the NHS and Defence are quite different organisations driven by different
purposes and objectives – we do different things often for different reasons, in different ways and in different contexts. These differences are important when it comes to trying to apply the military decompression model to the NHS and its staff. The model applied by the military is designed around the nature of and how we conduct military operations – the NHS’s role and structure is
Some thoughts on ‘decompress Group Captain (OF-5) Paddy Mckillop-Duffy 0030
