What happened?
This past year, Grace hasn’t been feeling herself – she has poor concentration sometimes and has had trouble sleeping. After speaking with her GP, she has realised that she is perimenopausal.
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Grace’s sleep is often disturbed and she finds it more difficult to recover after a night shift than before the menopause.
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This means she sometimes finds it difficult to concentrate, especially when learning something new.
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One day, Grace was working through her ward management tasks on the new IT system. She was struggling to work out the new system to do what she needed to do.
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Farhan came along and asked if she needed help. He showed her what she needed to do and she was able to complete the task.
And then?
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Grace was telling her colleague, Sally, in a meeting about her struggle with the new IT system.
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Sally said she was also going through the menopause. She had experienced hot flushes while at work which often interrupted the flow of what she was doing.
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The two women felt better after sharing their experiences. Sally recommended that Grace talk to her GP about HRT (hormone replacement therapy).The two women felt better after sharing their experiences. Sally recommended that Grace talk to her GP about HRT (hormone replacement therapy).
How to improve
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Women need to feel comfortable sharing conversations about the menopause with their colleagues.
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All staff, men and women, need to be familiar with symptoms of menopause.
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Employers need to offer women support for managing symptoms of menopause.
How we created the SWell Avatars
All characters, scenarios and events have been developed from data gathered as part of the SWell Birmingham research project. The scenarios and events have been altered from the versions provided by research participants to protect their anonymity.
How to use the SWell Avatars
We know from our research and our own experiences that when we are under pressure at work, sometimes we behave out of character, interactions with colleagues or with patients or their parents can be challenging, and sometimes things happen that are beyond our control. For example, unexpected patient deaths, which might lead to unpredictable reactions. Working in paediatric critical care is a high-pressure environment and so we know it is important to become self-aware, to prepare ourselves with the skills to manage those challenges, and to be able to navigate the unexpected.
We have created a set of Swell Avatars in different scenarios to highlight some of these kinds of situations and to make suggestions about how they might be managed successfully. We’re keen for our SWell Avatars to respect equality, diversity and inclusion principles and for them to represent the workforce. To achieve this, when creating the SWell Avatars, we have been mindful of the intersectionality between staff members and their protected characteristics (e.g., age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation).
We have created a number of scenarios, developed from real-life stories participants told us in our research. We have changed important details to protect their anonymity. We have identified potential solutions to the issues raised in the scenarios to help individuals find appropriate support and to help them reflect on and learn from the SWell Avatar scenarios. The SWell Avatars can be used to help facilitate a reflective conversation between colleagues, they might be used in mentoring, they could help teams identify new wellbeing initiatives or identify needs for staff training and development.
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