Compassionate Leadership Training course – Tuesdays

Compassionate Leadership Training for health and social care leaders. Compassionate leadership is linked with improved learning and innovation, and reduced staff stress, injuries and absenteeism, and even reduced patient mortality.

Six weekly two-hour sessions from Tuesday 14 May until 2 July 2024 (no sessions 28 May and 25 June). There is also a two-hour consolidation session on 17 September 2024 from 15.00 to 17.00 to review our learning and practice.

Overview

At the heart of compassion is the notion that everyone experiences difficulty, and that we can all play a role in alleviating our own difficulties and those of others. Whether this is compassion for ourselves or the people we lead, people who lead us, colleagues or service users. We won’t always feel like helping and will sometimes be tired or overwhelmed or unable to connect.

Although it helps to have positive feelings, we do not have to feel compassion to be compassionate. We can recognise our physical and mental state, resource ourselves as best we can, and respond from our firm compassionate intention, rather than from impulse or intense emotion.

How does this translate into compassion in health, social care and other organisations? How might we think about compassionate leadership, working with colleagues, service users and their friends and families? Prof Michael West has spent his career answering this question, pointing to research that shows how compassionate leadership is linked with improved learning and innovation, and reduced staff stress, injuries and absenteeism, and even reduced patient mortality. In short, compassion is essential to high quality healthcare.

Dr Robert Marx and Professor Clara Strauss have designed a training programme of six weekly sessions, each lasting two hours, with an additional follow-on two hour session a couple of months following the completion of the course.

Who is the course for?

The course is for anyone in a leadership role in a health and social care organisation, recognising that leadership occurs throughout health and social care roles, and at different levels of seniority.

What is the format of the course?

The course combines in-session mindfulness and compassion practice with reflection and discussion, as well as an invitation for home mindfulness and compassion practice to help cultivate compassion for ourselves and the people we lead and work with.

Facilitators

Clara Strauss

Clara is Co-Lead (Research) for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre. She is a consultant clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher and clinical researcher. In her research, Clara is particularly interested in developing and evaluating new forms of mindfulness-based intervention, especially for those people who may not be willing or able to access MBCT. Along with other members of her research team, Clara has been evaluating mindfulness courses for people experiencing depression, for people distressed by hearing voices and for people experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Robert Marx

Robert is Co-Lead (Training) for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre. He is a consultant clinical psychologist and has been involved in running mindfulness groups for staff and patients since 2006. He also trains and supervises others doing mindfulness work. He is interested in relational mindfulness and in adaptations of Mindfulness-based Interventions using compassion practices.

Apply and book your place

You can book your place below.

Please note, we ask all those who book a place on this training programme to fill in an application form that will be sent to the facilitators. If you haven’t already, please head here to fill in the form. If you are a member of staff at the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, please fill in the form first, before paying. There are a limited number of free places for staff that are offered on a first-come first-served basis.