Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust recently engaged the Practice Based Evidence consultancy to undertake an organisation-wide programme of Working with Risk training. By identifying a large cohort of senior clinical staff in ‘Leadership’ roles the Trust is establishing a positive commitment to working as constructively as possible within all teams. My role was to devise a training workshop that would reflect the principles and practice issues identified in the initial Leadership workshops. In addition to adopting their locally agreed set of principles and edited filming of Leadership discussions, I used my own materials on ‘Positive Risk-Taking’ and ‘Risk Decision-Making’ to facilitate reflective practice discussions as a main focus of the workshops. With the help of colleagues in ARW Training the cumulative evaluations across 50+ workshops were overwhelmingly positive. See the following two summaries for the numerical ratings of the workshops (the narrative comments cover too many pages to include, but broadly reflect the ratings).
Cumulative summary of workshop responses
Cumulative responses of additional workshops
The summaries represent 1252 and 72 responses respectively. The main lessons to be learned are that practitioners respond best to relevant and practical content that enables them to reflect on and develop their practice. Successful training workshops start with close attention to design and detail.