For healthcare professionals

Health and social care professionals today are under incredible pressure. Whether you are a clinician, social worker, manager, or an administrator - or one of the myriad other important roles within this profession - you face ongoing pressures on your time, energy, emotional resources, and life as you work to provide excellent care while keeping your own life in balance.

The impact of budgetary constraints and government targets affects everyone's daily life at work, whether it's a struggle to plan your recruitment pipeline, you end up working extra hours unpaid, you worry about breaching your clinical targets, or you don't have proper mental health support for the challenges you face in your working life.

You entered this profession - really a vocation, a calling - to make a difference to people's lives, because you care about others and want to help people. Yet under all these pressures, it's easy to reach compassion fatigue and even the point of burnout.

From our experience of talking to professionals, burnout is especially common when you can't make changes to the system - even when you can see a better way to do things. Sometimes you can make changes just by having a chat with your manager - yet a lot of changes can only be made at a high level, and are only effective when many other organisations are also on board. That's where we come in.

We listen to patients' and clinicians' ideas for change, and help to shape these initial thoughts into a business and ethical case for change. When the idea is ready, we organise test pilots with hospitals and care providers across the country, to gather the necessary data to evidence that the idea either saves the NHS money, saves staff time, or improves patient outcomes.

We engage with the NHS at strategic, operational, and clinical levels, to ensure we understand the impact of the proposed change. We especially want to ensure that changes have a positive impact for staff as well as patients, so we talk to people at all levels to find out what will work best and what will save the most time without compromising care.

Once we have all of the information at our fingertips, we present our policy recommendation to the appropriate health authorities. For smaller changes, this could be operational managers in hospitals across the country. For larger, policy-based changes, we would present to central health authorities - including the Department of Health and Social Care, and NHS England - to make the case for change.

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