Compassionate Leadership Training for health and social care leaders on Tuesday afternoons

Compassionate leadership is linked with improved learning and innovation, and reduced staff stress, injuries and absenteeism, and even reduced patient mortality.

Six online sessions on Tuesdays from 7 October until 18 November (no session on 28 October).

Following this, there is a follow-up session to review our learning and practice on Monday 8 December from 4 to 5pm.               

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, the people we lead, 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 and social care 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, lasting two hours each.

Find out more about Compassionate Leadership Training here. Hear from participants who have done the training in this short video.

Who is the course for?

The course is for anyone in a leadership role within health and social care. It will combine experiential practice and reflection, as well as home practice to help cultivate compassion for ourselves and the people we lead.

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.

Nicky Mouat

Nicky is a Registered Nurse and Mental Health Practitioner with more than thirty years of experience working in both mental health and general nursing for the NHS and equivalent, in the UK and Australia.

She completed her mindfulness training at the Sussex Mindfulness Centre in 2015 after finding mindfulness practice transformative in her personal life. She is now a freelance mindfulness practitioner and teaches mindfulness for wellbeing, depression, addiction, and long-term health conditions in the NHS and charity settings. She is also a supervisor, assessor and trainer of mindfulness teachers. She has a Masters Degree in Medical Anthropology, and specialised in how experiences of trauma are experienced and communicated across cultures.

As a BAMBA UK registered teacher, she follows the Good Practice Guidelines, receives supervision for her teaching, and attends regular retreats and training.

Apply and book your place

Bookings for this course will open in March 2025. You can register your interest in the meantime by emailing us at spft.smc@nhs.net, and we will send you a booking link as soon as the tickets for this event have been released.

Please note, for this course you have the option of paying via invoice. Please send an email to spft.smc@nhs.net if you want to use this payment option.

Ticket price:

• £200   

For enquiries: spft.smc@nhs.net