Creating Cultures of Collective Care

1 Jan 2026 10:47 AM

Anna Tickle, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Framework and Nottingham Recovery Network shares some thoughts on supporting the wellbeing of colleagues and clients as we enter the New Year.

If job adverts for homelessness services were truly transparent about what roles entail, few people might apply. The work can bring much ‘compassion satisfaction’, but also exasperating interactions with ‘systems’, exposure to vicarious trauma and at times direct trauma; the personal cost can be high.

The 2017 Stevenson and Farmer ‘Thriving at Work’ review of mental health and employers outlined that all organisations, whatever their size, should be equipped:

• with awareness and tools to address and prevent mental ill-health caused or worsened by work
• to support individuals with a mental health condition to thrive
• to know how to access timely help to reduce sickness absence caused by mental ill health.

This moved the conversation away from individual ‘resilience’, which can imply staff struggling to cope are somehow ‘weak’; this can create a dangerous context in which people conceal their struggles for fear of judgement. Acknowledging the potential impact of the work and employers’ roles in mitigating this allows greater openness and timely intervention.

At Framework, we have a tiered approach to mental health support: basic support for all can be preventative, while some people sometimes need reactive support to navigate challenges in work and life. We often draw on the work of Vikki Reynolds to emphasise the importance of collective care in resisting burnout. Our approach also recognises that staff and people using services can be helped by the same techniques and interventions: equipping staff with techniques to help others can also enable them to help themselves and each other.

Proactive support for all:

• Supervision: Lots of work has gone into developing supervision processes to include a focus on supervisees’ values (which power motivation) and wellbeing.
• Access to training and communities of practice: Through internal provision and close collaboration with the Practice Development Unit, staff have access to resources and training that can help them to support others’ mental health as well as their own. These include face to face and online training, e-learning modules written by clinical psychologists, and reading resources. Topics include:
  • Introductions to trauma-informed approaches and psychologically informed environments
  • Understanding and responding to trauma, including specialist topics such as: the trauma of domestic abuse and child removal; working with survivors of human trafficking and slavery; dissociation; trauma-informed understanding of personality disorder; recovery from trauma; and how to maintain wellbeing when working with people with histories of trauma.
  • Supporting people who are grieving
  • Motivational interviewing
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; which we have demonstrated can reduce exhaustion and increase work engagement for staff in our services).
  • Meaningful conversations (which uses ACT skills and techniques)
  • Safety planning
  • Coping with incidents at work
• Techniques to manage the effects of stress and trauma resource pack: We collaborated with the PDU to produce this pack of free or low-cost techniques that people can use alone or explore with someone they trust. It can be used by staff for themselves, or to support people they are working with.
• Reflective practice: As we cannot facilitate reflective practice for all our teams, we produced comprehensive guidance about how to facilitate this within teams, with example topics and prompts.
• Exploring discrimination and hate crimes: Given their significant impact on mental health, we produced a comprehensive guide to discrimination and hate crimes: definitions, causes, impacts and solutions. This aims to empower staff to understand and proactively address discrimination, and signposts to specific support for victims of hate crime.
• Dealing with death procedure: This psychologically informed procedure aims to prepare staff for how to respond in the event of a death of a person using a service or colleague, whether expected or sudden. Preparation can reduce the shock and impact of encountering death at work.

Reactive responses for those in need:

• Critical Incident Stress Management Debriefing by one of our trained debriefers is offered to all staff following incidents.
• Independent Employee Assistance Programme: Via their website and helpline, this provides wide ranging advice for work and home, and up to six sessions of counselling, without our organisation knowing this has been accessed.
• Wellbeing Practitioner support is available for team wellbeing interventions, as well as short-term, confidential interventions for individuals.

Our 2026 resolutions:

There is always more to be done and developed. In 2026 Paul, our Wellbeing Practitioner, will be piloting training on sleep, having become a Sleep Well Academy Workplace Sleep Ambassador. As sleep is so closely related to mental health (with each affecting the other) we hope this will promote staff sleep as well as giving them confidence to address sleep with people they support.

Another key resolution is to develop specific support available to staff with lived experience, to ensure their needs are recognised and met. Watch this space…

We hope you are inspired to make some organisational wellbeing resolutions for 2026!