Title: Building a peer group community

Abstract

Aim: To build a network of professional communities that engage, participate and facilitate in supporting each other with the key shared principles to promote a safe space for well-being, sharing good clinical practice, identifying quality improvement projects and working together to support each other in order to support compassionate care giving. Background: Nursing as a profession has for many years struggled with the retention of nurses in the NHS, the period of restoration and recovery following the Covid 19 pandemic is required to ensure that nurses are supported and wellbeing is central to the recovery to promote retention of a compassionate nursing workforce. Nursing by nature undertakes clinically complex work that can stimulate many emotional responses that can be hard to process and understand, leading to the inner critic take over a phenomenon that encourages self-blame, self dis-trust and compassion burnout. Methodology: Using Clinical Supervision to build resilience and restoration within a work based community, promoting a tool kit that can be used to pro-actively enhance a community of peer support, check in skills, mindfulness and a safe space to reflect, learn and promote self-care as well as compassionate care. Implementing a clinical supervision cycle as well as building support networks in multiple clinical settings and with multiple peer groups. Clinical supervision has been implemented as group clinical supervision within the preceptorship groups and individual supervision for ward based nurses. Alongside building peer support communities as a tool to support and promote quality and compassionate care. Outcome measured by qualitative feedback and engagement. Results: Qualitative feedback revealed positive themes and identified engagement in the process to promote well-being and maintaining compassionate care to avoid burnout and promote improvement projects. Conclusion: The nature of clinical supervision and building peer group communities facilitated with an element of mindfulness and positive reframing gives nurses the time, space and skills to recognise the importance of their own wellbeing and that of their peers, in turn encouraging the identification and development of projects to promote working and caring as a team to build on and demonstrate that clinical supervision can increase peer group support and in turn compassionate care giving as well as leadership.