The BOA Wellbeing Initiative

Deborah Eastwood - on behalf of the BOA

Back in January when we launched the BOA Burnout and Wellbeing survey we were critiqued, and rightly so, on various social media platforms for being ‘heavy’ on the burnout and ‘light’ on the wellbeing – well, we hope our wellbeing initiative will help correct that balance.

I would like to thank our colleagues in the wellbeing working group, Ben Caesar, Tony Clayson, Sue Deakin, Richard Dodds, Joanna Maggs, Suddhajit Sen and Raju Ramesh who gave up some of their free time to help us design and develop the webpage: we had many interesting discussions identifying resources that we thought would be helpful. We were guided as always by Lisa Hadfield-Law and Julia Trusler, and had valuable input from Parashar Ramanuj, a Consultant Psychiatrist at the RNOH.

We believe that if we are here to care for patients, support surgeons and thus transform lives, we must also care for ourselves, support our teams and foster change within the organisations we work with and work for. These three strands, the individual, the team and the organisation form the basis for our webpage content – content which is quite different from that which you would normally find on our pages. We hope you will enjoy dipping in and out of the pages and we would welcome your feedback to foster change within the BOA!

If we don’t take wellbeing seriously now, we’ve got a big problem trying to get our staff, ourselves and our colleagues to resume the work we know is so important.

Our teams have been fragmented over the last year and may be in need of some care and attention if not a bit of a rebuild: we can help, we can be kind, we can ask the questions and listen to the answers and help to put right the things that are wrong. Support is a much valued commodity and as with groceries on the supermarket shelves – it can be in short supply in pandemic periods – but we can and must adapt to the situation we are in. Life is opening up and we can and will relearn how to be there for others so that they can do the same for us. Click on the ‘team’ link for some ideas.

As the saying goes, there is no ‘I’ in team but there is an ‘m’ and an ‘e’ – so you do need to take care of yourself to be part of the team. Even if you are one of the 10% who are ‘fine’ why not click the ‘individual’ link on our page and check how you are?

As an organisation we are changing; we thrive on engagement, diversity and inclusion so please let us know how we can help you.

You can access the wellbeing initiative website pages at: www.boa.ac.uk/wellbeing.