Building and maintaining resilience

Overview

The link between how a person’s state of mind can affect their performance and engagement is understood by those working with people suffering poor mental health.  However, employees do not always recognise this themselves.  Very often employees will attend for work when they are unwell so they are “present” but not fully productive.

Understanding your own strengths, characteristics and matters which may affect your mental health and well being is part of building resilience to enable you to work through an event, respond to a situation, and in most cases emerge stronger from the experience.  However, both internal and external factors can impact on how quickly a person may recover from such situations.

Appraisal and reflection can help you understand whether you are able to work your way through the “issue” yourself or whether you may require additional inputs such as supervision, debriefing, coaching, mentoring or other form of intervention.

Staff feedback from those working in these support roles have identified that perseverance, tolerance, flexibility and having a positive attitude are key skills to maintaining your own personal resilience and seeking out support as and when required. Those working in the community, with local authorities,  voluntary sector organisations or as part of a programme of work to support those with poor mental health (peers support workers, personal assistants, employment specialist for ) may often be working with service users on a 1-1 basis and away from their main workplace. You may also be exposed to service user distress, anger, discomfort and frustration. This may create a level of emotion, stress or discomfort for you personally which needs to be recognised and supported.

Recognising whether your distress may be linked to a service user experience, the environment you are working in or personal factors is important. In such circumstances you may want to seek out debriefing or supervision to prevent an adverse reaction to a situation.

Working in a clinical environment may also impact on your day to day sense of wellbeing, particularly if you have had to impart difficult news or have witnessed a distressful situation for the service user/patient.

Why is this important

Working in health and social care is often challenging and it is important to build resilience and maintain boundaries to protect your own health.  Fundamentally if you are unwell or burnt out then it is hard to care for others, never mind yourself.

Building and maintaining resilience is not about struggling alone.  It is about using resources which may be available to you to assist with you.

Organisational or team culture can build resilience within and across a team, through collaborative working. Using networks to assist in problem solving can also help build a positive attitude and enable employees to persevere. Understanding the complexities of working with service users is part of understanding how your role supports their treatment and support planning and recovery. However, recognising when you have reached your limits of responsibility or competence is important in managing any potential adverse effects to a given situation.  At this stage seeking managerial/supervisory support is important for your own health and wellbeing. Many organisations also have their own staff networks in place to provide support.

Taking on too much responsibility for supporting a service user may equally impact on your own health and wellbeing. A service user may contact you when you are not contracted to work or ask you to support them with a task which is outside of your remit.  Setting boundaries at the beginning of any relationship building process will, therefore, be important. Being able to switch off and leave work behind will be part of setting your own boundaries.

Skills Review

Having completed this sub-topic I will understand the importance of these skills.

• I have the courage to seek out support/debriefing/supervision when I feel overwhelmed or unable to work through a particular situation or event. I am able to judge when my work is creating unhelpful levels of emotional or physical distress and put in place appropriate support arrangements or self-care.
• I am able to establish boundaries with my service users and apply and reinforce them as necessary.
• I am able to maintain my own health and wellbeing plan.