Resilience: a framework for supporting hospice staff to flourish in stressful times
30 March 2015 Evidence
In 2013 Hospice UK commissioned The Point of Care Foundation to write a report about the causes of stress for hospice staff, in response to the report issued by the Commission into the Future of Hospice Care.
Topics and programmes
This piece of work was initiated by Hospice UK in response to the report issued by the Commission into the Future of Hospice Care in 2013. That report forecasted a future that would demand significant change on the part of hospices, which in turn would make further demands on their workforce – both staff and volunteers.
We know from reported experience that healthcare staff experience high levels of stress and we wanted to find out whether hospice staff experience stress, what might cause it, and how to prevent it: are there effective things that can be done to support staff and mitigate stress?
This report is intended for hospice boards and chief executives but also anyone who has the responsibility of supervising, managing and leading groups of staff and volunteers, so that they can make informed and strategic decisions about how best to support their workforce.
We carried out literature reviews, which included academic and other studies, of the stress experienced by hospice staff and the measures that have been introduced to counter it, and we did a more selective review of the literature related to organisational change and ways of managing it.
Both these reviews (as well as our experience of running service improvement programmes with frontline healthcare staff, and talking to hospice chief executives) informed the framework and the checklist presented in this report.