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A blog from Sonya Robertshaw, Workforce Project Lead, on avoidable harm pilot in West Yorkshire

Posted on: 10 January 2025

Hello, my name is Sonya Robertshaw and I'm the Workforce Lead for the Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Programme. My role involves working with organisations across the West Yorkshire system to develop collaborative approaches to support the recruitment, retention and wellbeing of our workforce.A photo of Sonya Robertshaw.

One such approach has led to the development of a new pilot scheme running across the West Yorkshire health and care system. The programme, delivered by our HR team and the West Yorkshire Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub, will focus on avoiding harm in our employee investigations.

Supporting managers with disciplinary matters

Speaking as a professional with a background in HR, I can say that one of the hardest parts of the job is supporting managers with disciplinary matters. The process can be formal, sometimes involve interviewing lots of witnesses and can take a long time to complete. Quite often the member of staff concerned is off work whilst the investigation is ongoing. Emotions run high, and the process can be upsetting for all concerned.

As HR managers who trained years ago, we were taught to follow process, weigh up the legal risks, tick every box. When we're caught up in our work and have lots of investigations in hand, we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are real people at the heart of it, with families to support, who quickly become isolated.  Often those at the heart of the investigation suffer with their mental health and wellbeing because of the process.

All our organisations have wellbeing leads and Occupational Health providers, but we don’t always work together when developing our process to explore how we can ensure we adopt a compassionate approach and prevent harm being caused. In addition to harm to the individual, poorly applied processes can cause the organisation reputational harm and there is a significant financial cost when staff are off work for considerable amounts of time whilst processes are ongoing.

Avoidable employee harm

With the above background and understanding of the impact of the processes, I was really interested to hear about the work being developed in NHS Wales around ‘avoidable employee harm’. Led by Andrew Cooper, who is head of programmes in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, he also leads the 'improving employee investigations' work across NHS Wales with Health Education and Improvement Wales.

The focus on avoiding harm in employee investigations has subsequently been taken up by the Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) who have published the ‘When we do harm’ paper. The programme draws on learning from the patient safety movement and this animation video highlights the importance of the work, by changing the culture and approach to ensure that formal processes are always ‘a last resort’.

Pilot programme

We are delighted to be working with Andrew and colleagues from NHS Wales for our West Yorkshire partnership Avoidable Employee Harm pilot programme. It has attracted a huge amount of interest and we now have three mental health trusts, two acute trusts, the ICB and one local VCSE organisation taking part. We held our first virtual session in November and have an in-person training session taking place on Thursday 23 January 2025, reaching up to 100 of our local HR professionals, managers, wellbeing leads and trade union representatives. The pilot is being developed as a train-the-trainer model to support sustainability going forward.

If you’re interested in being involved in the pilot and attending the session on the Thursday 23 January, please email sonya.robertshaw@nhs.net.

​​​​

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