Piloting SWell Interventions in Paediatric Emergency Departments

After successfully delivering SWell sessions in Paediatric Critical Care (PCC) Units in England and Scotland, we decided to pilot them with staff in Paediatric Emergency Departments (PED).

The project ran in exactly the same way in PED as it did in PCC.

There are fewer standalone Paediatric Emergency Departments than there are PCC Units, with many Emergency Departments taking both adult and child patients. PCC has developed its own strong group identity, whereas in PED it’s not quite the same. Another key difference in PED is that the work is never done. Although in PCC, staff are caring for very sick children, in PED the incoming stream of patients never ends, which brings about a different kind of stress.

We recruited 5 PEDs in England and Scotland to pilot SWell sessions during 2024. Three departments delivered 28 SWell sessions to 103 staff. A change in psychological wellbeing scores was observed pre/post, but the sample wasn’t big enough to be able to determine whether those changes were statistically significant.

The paper reporting this study is currently in progress.