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 online weekly two-hour sessions from Tuesday 15 October until 26 November on Tuesdays from 3.00-5.00pm. There is no session on 29 October. There is a two-hour online consolidation session on 4 February 2025 to review 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 Marx is co-lead for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre and leads the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) in Talking Therapies in NHS services training centres collaboration. He is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and has been teaching mindfulness to patients and staff in the NHS for 18 years. He teaches MBCT and Mindful Self-Compassion. He has been practising Buddhist meditation for over 30 years, initially in the Theravadan tradition and then in the Tibetan tradition. He is passionate about building compassionate cultures in organisations and about integrating relational and mindful approaches to work.

Nicky Mouat

Nicky is a Mental Health Nurse and Mindfulness teacher. She works in the NHS at Pavilions Drug and Alcohol Service, where she has been facilitating Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention courses, and holding a weekly drop in for Service. Users and Staff. She has been teaching MBCT for the Wellbeing Service, and Recovery College in Brighton. She was also part of the Myriad Mindfulness in Schools Research Project, and was involved in teaching Mindfulness for Life to teachers in Sussex Schools. She has a particular interest in working with Service Users with ‘Dual Diagnosis’ (Substance Misuse and Mental Health Issues), and the way that Mindfulness can be helpful to this client group.

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.

There are a limited number of free places for staff at the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust which are offered on a first-come first-served basis. Fill in the form first, and we’ll let you know if you have a free place.