Staffwel - WELLNESS ENHANCEMENT LEARNING
StaffWEL - WELLNESS ENHANCEMENT LEARNING
What is StaffWEL?
StaffWEL involves information and practices linked to meditation, mindfulness and cognitive skills, self-care skills (for example on food and on regulating cycles of sleep and physical activity). However, information alone is simply not enough. The essential core underpinning TheWEL is the process of change.
People are guided through a process where they develop a new awareness of health and wellbeing based on self-compassion. This helps them achieve changes in self-care and self-management and has the potential to support sustained improvement over the longer term.
The StaffWEL programme is usually run as a face-to-face action learning group with around 20 participants. It is delivered over 4 half days once a week, then a fifth session after a few weeks’ gap. It includes a manual and DVDs. Other levels of engagement are also available – such as a one-day taster, initial talks, workshops or discussions.
So far, the StaffWEL programmes have been run with over 700 frontline healthcare staff across a wide range of disciplines in a number of NHS Boards. Research suggests that participants share their learning widely. Staff report sharing their learning with an
average of 10 other people through discussion, and sharing the manual and DVDs and the on-line resources.
What is TheWEL?
TheWEL is a new model of health creation that can bring change to people, systems and cultures. It came out of the growing recognition that the medical “fix-it” model is too often failing both patients and staff in the face of the long term conditions and epidemics of modern living.
At its core, TheWEL encourages us to move beyond our disease-focused work towards wellness enhancement. It aims to release people´s inherent strengths and capacities, creating self-sustaining self-care.
What’s the background to this approach?
TheWEL started with the aim of creating a new understanding of healing. This came from a direct field study over 20 years with people who had struggled with their health despite medical interventions, and then, with compassionate caring, had experienced meaningful shifts in wellbeing, recovery and self-care. This led the enquiry to look more deeply into people’s inborn capacities for change, healing, recovery and flourishing - and the inner and outer conditions that affect these. It is establishing a new model of health creation and guiding principles for care, drawn from these field studies of healing and wellness enhancement.
This learning was used to create practical learning programmes: TheWEL, The StaffWEL and Therapeutic Encounter. These courses are for the public, patients and professional carers and enable people to apply the WEL insights and principles in their self-care, life and work. The learning leads to proven transformations in wellness.
What do participants think of it?
Through the staff stories, quotes and linked videos that follow, we hope to encourage and inspire you, and your organisation, to see that as care staff we can achieve far greater impact for the better for our clients and patients if we consider the ‘healing shift’ principles as modelled in TheWEL project – learning to help people establish self-sustaining self-care.
Does it work?
Our research shows the transformations we can achieve in our own health as staff. It seems we are as stressed and unwell as our patients and therefore our health promoting advice is often hollow and lacks credibility.
A range of person-centred questionnaires, course feedback, deeper qualitative interviews, and biological markers showed that before TheWEL practising staff across a range of disciplines had similar, or at times worse, profiles than their patients, with high levels of suffering and chronic illness and objective measures showing almost half of patients and staff with fasting insulin levels suspicious of pre-diabetes, and extensive deficits of Vitamin D and Omega 3, markers for future long-term conditions.
After TheWEL these measures recorded positive and enduring impacts on health and wellbeing across a range of variables. People report enhanced wellbeing, coping and function, with useful shifts in physical measures away from the danger zones of today’s epidemics. Staff reported equally positive impacts on the way they approach and experience their work.
Creating spread and sustainability and seeding cultural shift
We describe our current phase of development as the ShareWEL. We support this type of work across NHS Scotland through presentations, keynotes, stands, lectures and conferences, and learning sessions and web resources.
Who runs the TheWEL?
This work is supported by the TheWEL charity that runs TheWEL Academic Department in partnership with the NHS Centre for Integrative Care.
In recent years the principal funding has come from the partnership with The Clinical Priorities Unit of the Health Department with direct support from Dr Aileen Keel, the Acting Chief Medical Officer, and the previous Chief Medical Officer Sir Harry Burns, CNOPPP –Chief Nursing Officer, Patients, Public and Health Professions and NHS GGC Public Health department.