NHS England and NHS Improvement Staff Health and Wellbeing Support
What are Staff ‘Common Rooms’ ?
Staff ‘common rooms’ are currently being offered as part of the wider national offer of support that is available to all NHS staff to help them to better manage during these stressful times by providing resources and spaces for colleagues to feel well supported in helping to maintain their own – and often others – physical and mental health and wellbeing.
So, what does this mean for me?
The ‘Common Room’ itself provides a new, confidential and safe space – in a virtual environment – in which you can focus just an hour of your time, at a time of your choosing, to share your own experiences amongst a small group of peers and, together, help each other to focus upon current issues and challenges and to develop future coping and support strategies.
Joining a ‘Common Room’ will link you directly to a small group (</=10) of ambulance staff peers – where you’ll be joined by two room ‘hosts’, each of whom will be a qualified health professional (or experienced professional in training), whose role it is to make sure that the room is safe and supportive for you – providing some structure and guidance to help everyone get the most out of participating.
And, as a result of participating in a ‘Common Room’ discussion, we very much hope that you will leave feeling better enabled to maintain your own personal health and wellbeing and to continue to focus and function well in your work and home life – all of which we know can be really helpful to us in promoting our own ‘natural recovery processes’.
Route into the ‘Common Rooms’
To access a ‘Common Room’ simply visit www.people.nhs.uk – the single route into accessing the whole range of support available to staff.
Once on the web portal ‘homepage, simply click on the ‘Support Now’ tab which can be found at the top of the page then scroll down to ‘Staff Common Rooms’ and simply click the link.
This will take you to the ‘Common Room’ calendar (kindly hosted by our partners at NHS Practitioner Health) where you can identify the specific ‘Common Room’ that’s right for you.
Once you’ve found the right room for you, simply click on it and you will be taken to a registration page – all details provided here will remain confidential and will not be shared with room hosts or other parties. However, registration is an important step in helping is to maintain your safety by verifying that you are an NHS colleague.
What happens in the ‘Common Room’?
Each room will run for one hour. There will be no more than 10 participants in each ‘room’ and they will be hosted by two experienced psychological group practitioners.