(See below for a transcript of the episode, which you can also watch as a video with subtitles here.)
Jan Bostock is a consultant clinical psychologist who works in the Northeast and Cumbria Wellbeing Hub for health and social care staff.
She’s also a key figure in the development of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (BPS, 2018), and is co-chair of the British Psychological Society committee for the Framework.
As well as reflecting on her experiences of the pandemic we also discuss how issues around power and social justice can be key to dealing with the mental health of those working for the NHS and social care.
You can find your local Wellbeing Hub for NHS staff here:
Here are some of the resources Jan mentioned:
- https://www.bps.org.uk/community-action-and-resilience
- https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Mary-Boyle/A-Straight-Talking-Introduction-to-the-Power-Threat-Meani/25519665
- https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ph22
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Transcript
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Dr. Paula Redmond: Hi, I’m Dr. Paula Redmond, a clinical psychologist, and you’re listening to the When Work Hurts podcast. On this show, I want to explore the stories behind the statistics of the mental health crisis facing healthcare professionals today, and to provide hope for a way out though compassion, connection and creativity. Join me as I talk to inspiring clinicians and thought leaders in healthcare about their unique insights, and learn how we can support ourselves and each other when work hurts.
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For this episode I spoke with Jan Bostock. Jan is consultant clinical psychologist who works in the Northeast and Cumbria Wellbeing Hub for health and social care staff. She’s also a key figure in the development of the Power Threat Meaning framework. I really wanted to talk to Jan because I think there are important questions of power and social justice that are key to grappling with the systemic issues around the mental health of those working for the NHS and social care. We began by reflecting on her experiences of the pandemic.
Jan Bostock: The pandemic happened for me within two or three months of me retiring from having worked in NHS mental health services for over 30 years. It was a bit of a strange time, and a time when my life was changing enormously. I was very keen to keep some work going. Actually, being able to go back and do some work has been a gift in COVID, because otherwise it was going to be a very unstructured and odd time to be around. I think the way it’s affected me is the way it’s affected everybody, that horrible ongoing threat of physical health worries.
Particularly for me, because I’m involved in the care of my mother-in-law, who’s 94 now, and very frail. Like lots of people, we really worried about her getting COVID, and then had to look after her and cared for her more intensively when she was very unwell. All the anxiety around that was emphasized and amplified by COVID worries, and also organizing ourselves and carers, and making sure we stayed as protected as we could. I think for all of us, there’s been uncertainty, disruption, horrible anxiety of constant change.
Some things have settled down and times, but generally, it’s had an impact on us at home and at work. There’s been this horrible loss of control of our lives. Having said that, I think I’ve been far less affected than particular groups of people, and that’s really concerned me because particularly people in key worker roles, people with learning disabilities, people living in institutionalized settings, they have been so terribly affected by COVID. I think one of the concerns that I’ve had particularly is around the effect on Black people, nurses, doctors, who’ve disproportionately suffered, and far too many of them have died and had their lives put at risk and been very unwell because of the pandemic.
I think while we’ve all experienced being unsettled and threatened by it, it’s been particularly unsettling for some groups of people. We know that people who are already experiencing disadvantage, those inequalities have been amplified by the pandemic. I think just one other thing to mention is the solidarity and teamwork, and pulling together that’s happened with COVID, and that sense of, in a crisis, Rebecca Solnit talks about this, about that propensity we have to reach out to each other and to tend and befriend, and that is hugely protective.
It can be tiring and can wear a bit thin, but I think it’s really important to hang on to that, too. We’ve seen mutual aid groups, apparently 900 mutual aid groups spread around the country through the height of the lockdown. Our neighborhood, I think, is closer-knit than it was before. There’s been time for different creative things to do, and there’s been some humor and some fun alongside terrible tragedy and uncertainty.
Dr. Paula: Yes, I certainly resonate with that, in terms of having a sense of living in my neighborhood for I think nearly nine years, but it’s really only been the last couple of years through the pandemic that I’ve met people and spoken to people, and certainly our neighbors at one point were the only people we would socialize with over the fence, having a coffee or glass of wine, or something. Jan, I know you mentioned that through the pandemic, you started working in one of the staff wellbeing hubs. Can you tell me about that? About the hubs and about the work you’ve been doing.
Jan: The opportunity fairly early on, quite a few newly retired colleagues joined a helpline that was set up in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. We offered telephone support to people. That’s been more formalized, and there are a number of regional hubs. I’m part of the Northeastern Cumbria Wellbeing Hub. This is for NHS and social care staff, and it provides a whole range of different interventions. It provides the helpline, which is staffed all through the week, and it means that anybody can ring up at any time and they will get somebody to talk to that day.
It might be a one-off, or it might be that they want to speak to somebody on the helpline two or three times. There’s also a therapy service for people. A number of people fall between gaps in services. Any of us who work in mental health services is so aware that there’s a huge gap, there’s a long, long waits for [unintelligible 00:06:52] services often, and a very high threshold for people to being seen in secondary mental health services. The therapy service as part of the hub is trying to bridge that gap for staff, in order to be more responsive.
There’s also a number of other things that the hub provides, things like team support groups, mindfulness, coaching and mentoring, music and art opportunities, staff webinars, and a huge number of self-help resources. Also, an online self-compassion course. I think the idea is that therapy isn’t the answer for everybody, and in fact, actually that’s not a great message. The ways forward are to have a range of things that bolster people’s wellbeing and keep them going through a very difficult time.
I think one of the characteristics of this service is that it’s outward focus, it’s not just bolstering individuals, but also feeding back to the acute hospitals, the mental health foundation trusts and care homes, and the ambulance service, and primary care, feeding back to them about what’s going on and can we be working more proactively to prevent some of the problems that people are facing.
Dr. Paula: What themes have come up, Jan, in your work?
Jan: One of the early themes that came up was around the scale of distress, and the scale of illness and death. Often, you get either people who are needing somebody to talk to that can be a link between their own experiences in their history, past history or recent history, and then that being exacerbated by what’s happening now. I think also we have been struck by the scale of loss being very difficult for people, and for the range of people involved in healthcare and social care, so people like chaplains and GPs, psychiatrists, nursing staff, care staff.
I think the volume of that tragedy that they’re dealing with has really impacted on them, and probably combined with the relative isolation that COVID has brought for people. Your usual networks and usual resources haven’t been available. That’s one issue. The other issue has been the demands at work, so very high workloads, low staffing, and the staffing really affecting day-to-day work for people. Very physically and emotionally demanding, people carrying unpredictable and high-risks. The nature of the work being traumatic. We’ve had an increasing number in the hub of people working in acute settings just very, very weary and exhausted, and not having a sense that it’s going to change, but actually that it’s getting worse again.
I think that’s been one of the difficult things about the pandemic. We’ve got a psychology around crisis, haven’t we? In managing crisis, but this is a very prolonged period of time to be working in an unusually pressurized way. I think that that’s a theme as well. I think the other theme, although maybe people are getting more used to this, but that they had to adapt at work. They were changed, they were put on different wards, they were put on different teams. They had to do different tasks. For some people, that was really challenging.
Someone who’s perhaps coming up to retirement that then suddenly has to go and do speech and language therapy in a different ward, or do nursing roles in specialist areas that they’re not familiar with at all. People being moved around and we know that change is unsettling, but also, I think when it’s change and you’re feeling that threat of not knowing what you’re doing and feeling not proficient in that area is very unsettling. I think that brings us to a term that I haven’t come across actually before the pandemic, but the idea of moral injury.
People don’t use that term, but time and time again, we hear from people who feel that their practice is compromised by the very difficult situations that they’re working in. For most of us who go into the NHS, we’re very values-driven and it really, really hurts people when they’re operating in situations that don’t bring out the best quality of care or where they’re not able to meet people’s needs in the way that they think they should. I think that’s a very important theme.
I think also that there’s probably less scope for staff to have control over the situations, to use their initiative to manage things that we’ve had to resort to a very command and control management style, which can be quite difficult. Change and that threat. Also, I think and Rachel Clarke wrote about this in her book, I don’t know if you came across Breathtaking, but she wrote about the terrible conflict between home and work. I think that’s an issue where you have people who’ve shown huge commitment and gone to work, and actually moved out of the family home in order to protect patients and protect their families.
I think for women, it’s this terrible sense of not doing things right, that they’re not meeting their children’s needs, that they’re not being the parent they want to be, but that they need to carry on at work and do the best they can in their work roles. I do think that’s been an issue. I think financial pressures and we are seeing people who are in work but they’re part of families, they’re part of wider social networks where partners were furloughed or partners were losing their jobs.
The whole system obviously is affected by that. I think people’s personal circumstances and that sort of interface between work and home has been really heightened by the pandemic.
Dr. Paula: I was wondering, you talked about the range of interventions that the hub offers. I was thinking about particularly from a more traditional psychology point of view, that as you said, therapy isn’t always the answer. It’s not helpful for everyone, and certainly not all of the time. I guess thinking about when therapy is useful and while we’re still in the midst of not an ongoing crisis, as you said, but a chronic state of threat, how helpful, how useful, how able people are to access therapy?
I wondered what you’ve seen in terms of the different interventions that the hubs have offered, what has been helpful, what have people responded to, what have people been drawn to and held onto during this time?
Jan: One of the really important characteristics of the hub is that sense of fellow feeling with the people using the service. There are a number of nurses that staff, the helpline, and they’ll often talk to other nurses, and share experiences and commonalities. I think same with that there’s a real strong sense of us. We really believe that’s an important way of being, so there’s a connection. One of the things that the staff emphasize in defining what they do is that they make a human connection. It’s a colleague-to-colleague connection with the person ringing.
It’s very important, I think. There’s a sense of solidarity and a sense of shared experience, and a really strong sense of validating what people are coming with. People are coming with difficulties, which we might call threat responses, but really understanding what people are coming with is in the context of the world and the situation that they’re in, and that any of us in that situation would feel in some way similar. There’s that strong validating sense of commonality between all of us involved, which you can do within a big NHS family in a way.
It’s been quite a revelation, I think, quite exposing and testing for the staff on the hub too. They’re very open and concerned about the scale of distress that they’re witnessing, and also that organization’s health service is so constrained. We know that some managers are quite sympathetic to workload issues and we’ll talk to staff about managing that, and really supportive but also important to actually change the situation. Staff are going back into teams where the workload really is too great. It is very challenging for managers as well who are very caught up in this.
I think just having the opportunity to share and hear that. The hub has been used by staff at every level. We’ve had regional managers, we’ve had team managers, and we’ve had support workers and staff working at every grade and band, and which feels very important. The hub does feel very accessible in that way. Having a phone line is very important. I think it’s interestingly different. There is the helpline, but also there is someone to one follow up. There is also this teamwork and mentoring, and coaching, and also that celebratory work together around there’s been a drama project and music, and arts, which I think is very important too.
The other thing that I’ve been involved with, which I think is important, and there’s probably further scope for that, is working with managers and training around what does good management look like. Actually, that’s important all of the time, but why is it particularly important that we manage in a collaborative way through this very difficult time? I think that’s an important approach to validate that for managers too and leaders. Not everybody’s a manager, but everybody’s a leader.
Dr. Paula: There was something that you said that struck me about maybe what the hub provides as that human-to-human connection being a really important antidote to some of the very dehumanizing processes that we can find ourselves caught up in, in the workplace. People can feel just like cogs in a big wheel and those management processes are often very opaque and nameless, and faceless. To be able to have a place where you can access a human connection and dip into that, I imagine is an important nurturing and sustaining antidote to that.
I wanted to ask you the other part of work that I know you’ve been very involved with over years, is the development of the power threat meaning framework. I wondered if you could explain what that is, and how it came about.
Jan: The power threat meaning framework was supported by the division of clinical psychology in the British Psychological Society as a way of developing a very open framework that was seen as an alternative to a diagnostic framework in order to have a more meaningful understanding of people’s distress and troubled or troubling behavior. It was co-produced by psychologists and service users, and took some years to develop. I was involved as a critical reader at that stage, and then since then, have become involved in the committee, which is developing in an ongoing way, and also providing training and more co-developed and co-produced work.
It’s a framework. It’s a way of exploring further and providing a lens for people to look at how their difficulties, their strengths, their resources, their coping strategies and survival strategies are linked with their experiences of power, of threat and meaning, and what’s around them. It’s a very environmental model, and it assumes that we all experience distress at times. There isn’t a separate group of people with mental health problems. That actually, all of us are in that same boat when it comes to, if you put us in certain circumstances, we will all use our survival strategies as best we can.
I think that model really suits the understanding of staff wellbeing because what we’re trying to do is to develop our understanding of how systems cause and can influence how people feel. Our individualistic psychological models may be useful for some of that journey, but they’re not always that useful for that holistic understanding, which really emphasizes prevention and which takes the focus off individual functioning and onto the whole system. We all make sense, so we all take meaning from what happens to us, and this influences how we experience and express our distress.
Meaning for staff is so important, so how we interpret feeling sick before we go to work and think, “Oh God, I can’t cope.” Or one of the things I was so familiar to me when I was working full time in the NHS, was that sense that I was never on top of the IT, and I was slow to complete the documentation that needed completing. I was never on top of things. I felt very inadequate, but actually those pressures and demands are really difficult for everybody. I think the power threat meaning framework really helps us see how our worlds affect us and helps us to get insight around that, but actually that insight is gained through looking out, through looking beyond ourselves as the only aspects of change.
With the right approach, if we have that kind of insight, then we can look to support each other, then we can look beyond individual or individualistic solutions, which I think are very powerful.
Dr. Paula: Maybe, Jan, because I know my understanding of the path threat meaning framework is a series of really useful questions that can help with this elaboration. I wonder if you could talk us through those questions.
Jan: I’d love to, yes. The path threat meaning framework has very much been developed in a mental health setting. There’s a really good book, Straight Talking Introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework by Mary Boyle and Lucy Johnstone, who’ve had a lot to do with the development. Well, they’ve pioneered its development. The questions that are asked are often around individuals functioning, and strengths, and resources, and situations. The questions are asked things like, what happened to you? What is happening to you?
That’s a way of understanding how is power operating in that person’s life? What sense do they make of what is happening? Often, people come with stories of illness and suffering, and individual signs of distress. What we are doing is linking what’s happened to them with how they feel and what meaning they’re giving those feelings. Then thinking about what threats are around for that person and what threat responses are they using? Because we all use threat responses if we are put in certain situations. How are we responding? How is the person surviving and what matters to them? What are their strengths?
In a way, we all carry stories around with us to explain how we feel. Often, the story that we are given is a medical story when we come into mental health services. It’s a kind of illness narrative about what might be wrong with us. The power threat meaning framework draws on trauma-informed practice to say it’s not about what’s wrong with us, but about what’s happening and what, or what has happened to us. What we’ve done is we’ve translated these questions that the power threat meaning framework suggest, and we thought about how are they relevant to the hub and the helpline.
The kinds of questions that we’re asking when people come to the helpline are, what’s brought the person to the helpline or the hub? What’s going on for them? What’s going on for them at work? What’s going on for them at home? Are the demands that are in excess of what they can provide? What opportunities for control do they have? Have they got support? What are their relationships like? Are their roles clear? Or as with we’ve seen with the pandemic, there’s a huge role blurring and interference between work and home.
Then we are thinking, are there any particular threats that are shouting out to us? Threats like loss, bereavement or threat to working well, that kind of moral injury threat of not being able to do the job you think you should be doing, of is there a threat to relationships? Some people weren’t able to see boyfriends, girlfriends. There were huge pressures on relationships, as well as pressures on relationships with parents and with loved ones who might have been relatives or friends. Are there any threats from the illness itself or from other illnesses? Threats to finances and threats to identity. The power threat meaning framework is very good at describing the huge range of threats that we can experience.
Then the third question is, what threat responses or ways of surviving are being used? What we try to bring in earlier in those sets of questions is, what strengths are people already using? The people that we’re seeing are hugely resourceful, they’re keeping jobs going that are often very demanding. Just reminding them and asking them about what resources they’re drawing on. Then the next question is, what sense of their situation are they making? What are their beliefs? What are their feelings? What are their bodily reactions? How is that influencing what sense they’re making?
Often, people feel very, very guilty about not feeling on top of things at work, and the other very prevailing belief and such a very important powerful force in the NHS and in social care is that sense of teamwork. If you are not on top of things, that you are letting your colleagues down. It’s interesting to discover that through these interviews. People feel really bad if they’ve got to take time off. People feel very loyal to their jobs and to their colleagues, but that can add to the pressures.
Then what strengths and resources is the person drawing on? What strengths are there at work, their friends, their family, yoga, or distractions, or music, and their values. Values are very, very strongly protective. They can be pressurizing at times, but also, if we can remember what we’re doing this for, that is very sustaining. What we’re trying to do is to help people to look up and out as well. Lots of suggestions around connecting with the trade union, mentoring, connecting with somebody else perhaps from a different team who might help you through a difficult time, or coaching around career choices. It’s not just looking inwards but also looking outwards.
Those are the key questions that come out of the power threat meaning framework, which are very usable in everyday language and everyday practice.
Dr. Paula: I find that so powerful, just thinking about my own therapy work with health professionals. I think often people are coming with the question of what’s wrong with me and how do I fix it? I think to be able to have a space to step back from that and to ask those questions about what’s happened to you, and what have you had to do to survive in that, can just be so powerful in enabling people to tap into a sense of compassion for themselves and to shift their relationship with their distress. Being able to see it as something that they can take care of and respect, rather than as a sign of being weak or broken, and just having that different conversation can be really transformative, I think.
Jan: Yes, I think so. Actually, the way that we ask those questions and the way that we forge that relationship with people, is very important, so that we’re equalizing power in our relationships with people. I think the power threat meaning framework is good for reminding us of that too. I think the other thing that the scope for, is for us to think about organizations from the perspective of power threat and meaning, and strengths as well. Think about how do organizations respond when they’re under threat.
You mentioned before, about how way that we are managed and led in health organizations can be very objectifying, and I think we could see that as a defense and an organizational defense. You know what happens when the organization feels under threat. Often, it goes into overdrive of asking you for more information, for reassurances that practice is actually good enough, but actually that can be very alienating. I think that the power threat meaning framework is really helpful for us to think about what does the organization do.
One of the things that I think can happen is that staff can feel mistrusted or blamed, or scapegoated. There can be a micromanagement and hypervigilance around staff performance. This is actually doesn’t bring out the best in them and there can be a kind of leadership which doesn’t harness staff initiative and staff strength. One of the things that we did really promote in CNTW, the trust that I was part of, was a push to collective leadership because we often waste a lot of initiative that staff have.
Staff have really interesting challenging lives. They can bring so much to the work environment, which can help for collective solutions and problem solving, and harnessing people’s strengths. I think that can get lost if you have a very command and control culture. I think changing the culture in our NHS leadership and in our organizations is really important. We know that the more that staff are involved in decision making, the more that they have a voice in the way that the organization runs, the better the patient care and the better the deal is for people who use services.
I think another organizational threat response is around organizational change. That if things aren’t working well and you fix it by reorganizing services, which is incredibly threatening and unsettling for staff, and can put a pause on the quality of services improving. Also, the other, I don’t know whether this is true in acute settings, but certainly in in mental health settings, there’s a belief that technical solutions are going to improve the quality of care and make life so much easier for staff.
If you bring in more and more electronic devices and enable people to work in that way, that somehow that’s going to free us up and make us better clinicians. I don’t think that always worked. We could become enslaved to these digital procedures. I think what you said about objectifying people, people, they need to feel important and that their efforts are recognized and valued. That isn’t just about to then– I don’t know, a thank you from the chief exec, although that’s really important. It really has to be meaningful, and feel authentic and sincere.
Unfortunately, that puts huge pressure on managers and colleagues to be very available to staff in a way that actually is very, very difficult in the current time. I found that power threat meaning framework really helpful to bring alive an understanding of how organizations work. For instance, managers can feel that staff can be a bit reluctant to change or to weather change, but actually often organizational change comes with threats. I think the power threat meaning framework really helps us to recognize that.
The other thing that I think is a lovely combination of a community psychology approach with the power threat meaning framework, and also with what we’ve heard through the pandemic, particularly from Steven Riker, the social psychologist, is this sense of the power of us, the power of collective action, the power of a strong identity that we’re all in it together, that we can all support each other. That’s why it’s so important that our leaders, be they leaders in health or leaders in politics, that there are seen to be acting and living in a way that’s congruent with what we’re all having to do.
That’s actually a very powerful intervention in itself, which is why it’s been so dispiriting and difficult over the last few weeks seeing the evidence that that hasn’t been true of some of our political leaders. The power of us, I think, is something we should be harnessing.
Dr. Paula: Yes. Just for the listeners, we are recording this just before Christmas 2021, and we are having daily revelations around ministers and 10 Downing Street having parties while the rest of us were under strict lockdown measures. As you say, Jan, it just feels so painful and so damaging to that sense of us and to the sense of coming together to weather this horrific storm.
Jan: One of the really interesting aspects of the power threat meaning framework is that it talks about ideological power, and it talks about the importance of messaging, the importance of what our social media messages are, what our culture is communicating, and that does matter to individuals, and that I think that that’s very well described in the framework. The embodiment of compassionate leadership needs to be really strongly communicated.
If we get messages around, I don’t think that professionals, health professionals are avoiding seeing people face to face, or that teachers don’t want to go back to school, and be in the classroom, those things are very damaging. It’s giving a message that these people aren’t really committed and there and then, they’re not us. I think that’s so important is this sense of promoting a stronger sense of unity and a stronger sense of shared identity. Also, that we achieve our best results in terms of health outcomes and good practice if we lead through people, not over people. I think the same has been true about the pandemic actually. People’s cooperation with restrictions is very, very high, and the media have tended to overplay exceptionalism. Growing a sense of a united us, that we’re not an in-group and an out-group, there isn’t an elite who’s doing something different, that we’re all in this together, I think is a profoundly important lesson to learn.
Dr. Paula: I wonder, Jan, how that relates to some of the differences or the dichotomies that we see when comparing health services with social care and those staff who might work in care homes, for example, who I think have far less visibility and far less status in our society, even though they’re doing, we could argue, the most important work.
Jan: Yes. There’s been some very, very upsetting conversations with care staff who just felt so committed to their work and yet just the scale of loss that they witnessed in the care homes during that second wave was traumatizing. I think you are right about the fact that they’re not rewarded financially particularly well for doing the jobs that they do. They work long hours. They often have very little control over shift working.
The other thing that struck me was sometimes you would start to ask about the person’s personal life, and you’d find out that when they weren’t at work, they were doing 30 hours childcare for their grandchildren. There was a combination of pressures and demands that was really very great and really propping up of the members of their families. I think you’re right, all of that work isn’t really valued and really weighed very heavily on women, I think, throughout the pandemic.
Dr. Paula: Is there anything else, Jan, that in terms of the power threat meaning framework that we haven’t talked about that you want to?
Jan: I was thinking about what’s the summary of why is the power threat meaning framework useful? Because it adds to other models that we’ve lived with and appreciated for many years. I think trauma-informed practice has been profoundly influential and important for improving mental healthcare. What I think the power threat meaning framework does, is that it explicitly looks at power dynamics. It enables us to understand experiences at work with reference to fairness and justice, because how we interpret what happens at work is so important for how we feel.
In the health service, as you know, in nursing, and in psychology, and allied health professionals, we’ve got this very rigid band system and people are very aware of where they sit in their bands and what they do, being fair in comparison to other people. In some ways, that is very enabling, but in other ways, it can be stultifying and difficult for people to have a career advancement or career development. I think the power threat meaning framework gives us a way of analyzing how that is significant for individuals and for the organization, because actually, I think we can withstand a lot if we think things are fair.
That’s one of the reasons why this recent surge of evidence around some people breaking rules has been so upsetting for people because we all have a strong core need for fairness. That’s one reason why I think the power of threat meaning framework is very important. It also changes the narrative from looking at individuals and pathologizing how we feel. It changes the narrative to looking at our resources, our strengths, and the social and organizational worlds that are around us. It helps us to connect what’s happened to us with how we feel and how we function.
It’s hugely validating and enabling for individuals and for organizations. I think it actually facilitates us connecting with others and it facilitates collective awareness. As I pointed out earlier, it helps us to reflect on our own use of power. How is our service operating in a way that is genuinely empowering and enabling for people? Then I think it sets the scene for action because it makes us aware of what we need to do.
We know that compassionate leadership is hugely important. We know that enabling connection between people is hugely important, but we also know that our organizations need to be set up so that they’re not asking too much of people, that the demands are manageable, that people have a measure of control and autonomy, and have the support that they need. It’s about how we feel, which psychology is good at talking about, but also, the power threat meaning framework helps us to look at the conditions that we need to thrive at work.
Dr. Paula: Brilliant. Thank you, Jan. For people who might want to read more about the power threat meaning framework, maybe particularly for non-psychologists who might be interested and who might want to take some of these ideas back to their workplace, what are the best places to find out more?
Jan: Well, there is a website on the British Psychological Society with lots of examples of good practice. Also, this book from 2020 that’s called The Straight Talking Introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework by Mary Boyle and Lucy Johnstone. There are a range of resources around. I think it’s also worth looking at NICE guidance, because it’s all very consistent in what they’re saying and what we are saying from a psychological point of view.
Dr. Paula: Just thinking now a bit more personally, Jan, about what are the sorts of things that keep you going in the midst of what you’ve been managing professionally and personally, what keeps you going?
Jan: Well, I do have a very nice life. I’m very lucky and very comfortable. I live in a lovely place, and I’ve got a lovely dog, and family, and notice I say the dog first. [chuckles] Anyway, that does keep me going hugely. My connection with my family and my friends is enormously protective and enables courage and creativity, which is very important. I think I have a very strong sense of commitment to the NHS and commitment to social care, and a just and fair community. Those values, they are important, and they do keep us going.
I think I have a strong connection with other psychology colleagues and health colleagues. That’s very affirming as well and very energizing. Although I’ve been somewhat anxious about today, but these connections actually and talking to you, Paula, are really important because they give us authority. They bolster our knowledge and our epistemological power actually, and that’s so important because you can get distracted and lost, and feel very overwhelmed by what’s going on. I think those connections are important too.
Dr. Paula: Thank you. Well, it’s been brilliant talking to you, Jan, and thank you for putting some of those really complex, big ideas into a lovely, digestible, and actionable form. Thank you so much.
Jan: Thank you, Paula.
Dr. Paula: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please do share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. I’d love to connect with you, so do come and find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also sign up to my mailing list to keep up to date with future episodes, and get useful psychology advice and tips straight to your inbox. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks again, and until next time, take good care.
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[00:49:45] [END OF AUDIO]
