About us
What is The Wellbeing Line?
The Wellbeing Line offers confidential mental health and wellbeing support to anyone working in health and social care in Gloucestershire.
Our service is available to all staff, no matter your role. It is completely independent of your employer, and nothing is written in your personal records.
Our team is experienced in understanding mental health and provides a confidential “safe space” for people to talk about their mental health and wellbeing.
Support Provided
The Wellbeing Line offers support for individuals, consultations for team leaders/managers and also support to teams. All support is tailored to your needs, or to the needs of your team.
We can support you with a wide range of mental health issues that may be impacting your work and personal life, including:
- Work-related concerns such as grievances, redeployment, moral injury, difficult working conditions.
- Emotional wellbeing/mental health concerns, including exhaustion/burnout, trauma, depression, anxiety.
- Personal circumstances such as bereavement, relationship issues, lifestyle changes, underlying health conditions.
- Covid-related concerns such as long COVID, anxiety or stress related to factors caused by the pandemic.
Mission and Vision
Mission
Our mission is to destigmatise mental health and ensure the development of compassionate and psychologically safe organisational cultures across the health and care sector in Gloucestershire.
Vision Statement
The Wellbeing Line aspires to create an environment where compassion is the thread running through every level of organisational wellbeing. Resulting in improved emotional wellbeing and stronger mental health for all staff working in health and social care.
What we do and how we do it
Approach
Approach
- Independent
- Compassion Focused
- Trauma Informed
- Collaboration
- Connection
- Consultation
- Culture Change
Individual
- Access to immediate Assessment and Formulation
- Support to navigate resources and interventions - locally, nationally and online
- Group Interventions
- Enhanced Clinical Assessment and Risk Assesment
team
- Consultation
- Support tailored to team needs
- Psycho-education Sessions
- Mental Health Workshops
- Mental Health webinars
Leadership
- 1:1 Consultation to Team Leads/ Managers
- Mental Health Specific Training
- Peer Connecting Sessions
- Compassionate Leadership Conversations
Organisational
- Strategy Development across ICS
- Bespoke Projects
- Subject Matter Experts
- Central Point of Contact
- Data Collection and Triangulation
What does that support look like?
Compassion focused – at the heart of our work and the framework underpinning everything we do is the compassionate mind model and compassion focused therapy. This model allows us to think about ourselves at all levels – the individual level, the self in relation to others and the self within large organisations and as part of a wider system of health and social care.
We are trauma informed – The Wellbeing Line was set up in response to Covid 19, which can be conceptualised as a societal trauma, therefore we think about how we support people through a trauma informed lens, recognising that we need to support each other to grow beyond the impact and harm that was caused by Covid. We also, more broadly, hold in mind the individual life experiences and “stories” of all individuals with whom we have contact, in order to inform our interventions and remain person-centred in our work.
We put connection with others at the heart of our model, as, whilst we recognise the importance of self care and developing individual resilience, the compassionate mind model also focuses on the importance of our attachments and relationships with others. We work in organisations that are all about people and connections at all levels.
We provide a consultation approach to a lot of the work we do, as we are a team of psychological practitioners and draw on our psychological training and understanding of what it is to be human to inform our offer.
Ultimately, we are committed to ensuring a culture change, where the mental health and wellbeing of staff working in health and social care is considered to be as important as that of the patients for whom we care.
Who is the service for
Offer of Support
So in a little more detail, our offer includes individual support, team support, support for team leads themselves and support for the organisation as a whole. This is an NHS funded service but is open to anyone working in health and social care.
Individual
We offer direct access to support, without need for referral or the completion of any paperwork or questionnaires; We encourage you to make contact by phone, for a supportive and non-judgemental conversation. We will listen to your concerns and work together to make sense of what is going on, then think about possible ways forward. In some cases, we will offer further clinical assessment with a clinical psychologist. We will always offer to follow up and “check in” with you a couple of weeks after your initial call to see how you are, to ask if you have found the support/resources helpful and to explore additional options if necessary.
If you prefer to email in the first instance then we will respond within 2 working days to arrange a telephone call. At the moment, our phone lines are open Monday-Thursday, 9am-4:30pm and Friday until midday. We are, however, able to facilitate calls outside of those hours by prior arrangement.
- NOT an emergency or crisis service
- NOT replacing services already provided by your organisation
- NOT a therapy service
The Wellbeing Line exists to come alongside and complement work that is already going on within organisations etc. (not intended to duplicate but to identify gaps, take projects forward etc.).
team
We offer a range of support for teams and it is important to us to ensure our support is targeted at the specific needs of each team.
We encourage managers and team leaders to speak with one of our clinical psychologists in the first instance to discuss options for team support.
TEAM LEAD
Managers and team leaders are welcome to call or email if they are concerned about a colleague and/or if they would like to think about ways to support their team.
We offer a telephone or MS Teams consultation with a clinical psychologist and think together with you about possible ways forward.
We also offer access to our Leading with Compassion course and to Peer Connecting sessions for line managers.
Organisational
For example:
- We are delivering Thriving in General Practice workshops for the GP surgeries
- We are leading on the roll out of the Health and Wellbeing Champion role across the ICS
- We provide support for staff with Long Covid
- We have developed a pathway of support following an adverse events (GHC only)
We have a Welcome Pack, which we can send to you. It includes information and tips about looking after your mental health and wellbeing as you begin work or join a new service within health and social care.
Explain that we gather a lot of “intelligence” about the mental health and wellbeing of the workforce and can feed this anonymously back into the organisations in order to help shape strategies and good practice that puts staff needs on the agenda, as much as the needs of our patients.