Publish date: 8 December 2023
October's Employee of the Month winner is Cheryl Farrell, clinical team manager for Routine Assessment - St Helens. Cheryl was nominated by Kate Andrews for the value of Support.
Cheryl is such a good manager, she supports the team and steps in to keep the surgeries running. She is very supportive on a personal level, she will drop what she is doing if you need her for anything, nothing seems to phase her. She has good knowledge about the service, and she is willing to share this knowledge to newer members of staff. She has always been there if the team needed her for anything.
One of our team members was having a hard time at home and despite the fact that the GP wanted her to go on long term sick, Cheryl was able to step in to help this member of staff to remain in work as she made her feel safe and supported. Nothing is ever too much for her and she does it all with a smile on her face. Cheryl is approachable willing to listen to any concerns work or personal related, she puts everyone at ease will drop her own commitments to support staff and is dedicated to her role with a wealth of knowledge.
All of the examples detailed in the nomination have come directly from team members who I have approached. The impact on us all as a team has allowed us to feel that we are being well managed, listened to and taken seriously. She offers the wider service insight into the pressures we face within our role and takes a lead in escalating any concerns within the interfaces of other services. The patients have also given us wonderful feedback when she has stepped in to cover clinics when staff have been off sick. The GP's feel that they can approach Cheryl with any mental health related queries, and she will respond quickly and appropriately to those queries. She is very visible to the team and wider Mersey Care colleagues which means that there is always a reliability with the support and expertise she offers.
October's Team of the Month winner is Older Adult Community Hub and Care Home Liaison, Warrington. The team was nominated by Louise Burns for the value of Continuous Improvement.
The team completed the Oliver McGowan Training elearning earlier in the year, which generated a lot of conversation and reflection within the team. The staff were wanting to talk about it in their supervision and how it had made them feel and reflected on their own practice. From this, we held a reflective practice session for all the team to attend, where they shared more thoughts around this and how we could embed into our service making sure that patients and carers are listened too. As a team we felt that we could do more for our dementia patients are we in this reflection talked about Advance Care Planning, and how and when to incorporate this into our service.
From the reflective practice session, we then took this to our team away day and completed a session on Advance Care Planning, and what we could do before this, and decided that we would try and incorporate "This is Me" into our post diagnostic information packs.
By including "This is Me" into the post diagnostic packs we are encouraging patients and their families to write down what is important to them while they can, while patients have capacity helping them to share with their families’ things they may never have thought of, but are really important to them, that their families may not even know. Helping patients to understand that in the future they may lose capacity, (dementia patients may live for many years without insight or capacity in some areas of their life) but they can still have control over this but making an Advance Statement, “This is Me”, an Advance Care Plans.