Kate Lorrimer, Strategic Director of Relational Care

The launch of the Relational Care Faculty in November last year has sparked conversations about how we can build compassionate mental health systems, and how we can make sure they are a key part of our day-to-day practice, both in the way we interact with our staff and our patients.   

First, I always start by emphasising that relational care is about supporting staff to be alongside patients in their distress and putting therapeutic relationships first in the busy, pressured environments of mental health services.

To achieve this prioritisation and build a compassionate mental health system, not only for our service users but also for the wider organisation, we aim to champion the 4Rs in providing care: 

• Rights-based care that respects people’s rights to life, citizenship, autonomy, choice, equality and freedom from coercion/harm. Our organisational practices respect employee rights, and promote autonomy, choice, equality and freedom from command, control and punitive approaches.
  
  
• Relational care that prioritises compassionate and therapeutic relationships with the person at the centre of their support network and community. Our working relationships are kind, open and promote psychological safety and professional curiosity. We value diversity of voice and background and collaborate with each other and our communities.
  
  
• Reflective support to the whole system. Staff are supported through reflective practice to be alongside people in their distress. We build a supportive infrastructure to promote, and value lived experience leadership and peer support.
  
  
• Responsive care with clinical continuity to the person and their whole network. We continuously measure patient experience, evaluate and improve. We provide timely support to staff, with visible leadership modelling relational ways of working. We continuously measure staff and patient experience, evaluate and improve. 

Our aim at the Relational Care Faculty is to create a supportive, safe space to maximise collective responsibility for achieving change and our work is underpinned by dialogical practice and encompasses wide areas of work, including: 

• The national Culture of Care Programme
• The Adult Mental Health Clinical Strategy
• Peer-supported Open Dialogue
• The work within the Trust to move away from Closed Cultures
• Reducing Restrictive Practice
• Risk Formulation
• Relational Security
• Enhanced Care and Engagement
• The work to improve/integrate the whole pathway of care
• Commissioning of new crisis services such as the Redbridge Well House, the Waltham Forest Community Mental Health Hub, and the 24/7 Mental Health Crisis Assessment Hub. 

I am hoping that this list will expand as our team connects and aligns various workstreams across NELFT, providing a coherent organisational infrastructure that creates a link from frontline to board and between each area of work. 

We are also looking beyond organisational boundaries to maximise learning and sharing of good practice by including key external stakeholders leading on relational change in other organisations and nationally. 

But most importantly at the heart of everything we do is a co-produced reflective approach, at every level of the organisation, with people with lived experience of the services we deliver. Because we can only address our most complex challenges if we work together to problem solve and innovate.