Supporting staff wellbeing with a focus on health visitors

This article explores ways of cultivating wellbeing among the specialist community public health nursing health visiting workforce. Three key themes emerged from a Welsh strategy analysis and wider literature review: developing working cultures that prioritise restorative clinical supervision practice; high-level strategic workforce planning; and the importance of fostering a compassionate culture of leadership. Health visitors could be supported through the development of a project implementation plan, which would outline a staff working group to lead on wellbeing, championing initiatives such as restorative clinical supervision. There is scope for such plans to be extended to colleagues in Wales and the wider health and care workforce.

This article has been double-blind peer reviewed

In this article…

• Benefits of working cultures that prioritise strengths-based restorative clinical supervision practice

• Why high-level strategic workforce planning for public health services is needed

• How fostering a compassionate and caring culture of leadership can benefit services

Key points

There is an increasing trend of work-related stress in the NHS

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed considerable workload demands and staffing crises resulting from the underfunding of public health services

There is a deficit of health visitors, leading to larger caseloads for remaining staff and a higher risk of burnout

A focus on restorative clinical supervision, better workforce planning and fostering a culture of compassion is needed

The implications of such measures are far reaching across the healthcare workforce