My Whole Self – celebrating employee empowerment in the NHS
South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust is proud to be supporting My Whole Self, MHFA England’s campaign for workplace culture change.
The campaign calls on organisations to empower employees to bring their whole self to work. Bringing your whole self to work means feeling empowered and comfortable to bring all parts of your identity to work, including you background, sexuality, religion, gender, physical and mental health.
By bringing together diversity and inclusion with health and wellbeing, we hope to drive positive transformation in workplace mental health and performance. Teams that feel safe and connected work better together. We want our people to feel psychologically safe, seen, heard and valued which is why we have decided to get involved.
Chief Executive Vanessa Ford said: ‘As our ways of working have become increasingly flexible, supporting human connection and developing psychological safety within teams is more important than ever. With continuing initiatives like our Psychological Safety development programme for colleagues, we know that engaged and motivated staff create a positive Trust culture, which results in better care for patients and a better experience for our colleagues.
I feel so privileged and proud to be the CEO of our Trust and can only carry out this role by being true to myself and bringing everything I am (the good and the bad!) to the role in a real way - trying to be someone I am not just wouldn’t work. That doesn’t mean I always get it right - but it does bring integrity!
We encourage people to bring their whole selves to work and run a monthly Q&A with a different colleague to find out more about them. You can also find out more about some of our nursing colleagues.
This work builds on our groundbreaking initiative - funded by the South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust Charitable Fund in partnership with MHFA England, and funded by NHS Charities Together - to offer a programme of free Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training to local residents of Springfield Village in South West London. These initiatives are part of our commitment to ‘Making Life Better Together’ for our patients, communities and staff.
You can find out more about the campaign and download resources.
