The “Team Tree” Professional Tree of Life intervention: development and evaluation within the acute inpatient psychiatric setting
Abstract
Purpose
Mental health staff often experience significant levels of stress working in the acute psychiatric inpatient setting. Team-building interventions can mitigate stress in health-care settings, via improvements in team-cohesion, staff interactions and communication skills. The “Tree of Life” (ToL) is a specific narrative therapy approach which uses the metaphor of a tree to facilitate the construction and sharing of strength-based stories. This study aims to describe the development of and evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and staff experiences of the “Team Tree”, an adapted Professional ToL (PToL) intervention.
Design/methodology/approach
A one-hour, Professional ToL intervention was designed for multidisciplinary acute inpatient staff teams working within a psychiatric hospital in London, UK. A mixed methods approach was used to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and staff experiences of the session.
Findings
Participants were 46 multidisciplinary staff (33 women; 13 men) working across four acute psychiatric wards. The intervention was feasible to deliver and was acceptable to participants. Results showed significant improvements in self-reported mental well-being and team-cohesiveness scores post-session.
Practical implications
Psychologists face myriad barriers in working with staff teams in the acute inpatient setting. The “Team Tree” intervention was both well received by staff and practical to deliver within the challenging environment of the acute ward.
Originality/value
This adaptation of the original PToL emerged from the author’s work with distressed inpatient teams with limited time resources. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first description of this intervention using a single tree metaphor to facilitate a reflective and creative session with health-care teams.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
At the time of this evaluation, two authors were working at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. At submission, the lead author was clinical lead for staff support at King's College Hospital and is presently based at the Chelsea Psychology Clinic, London. We would like to acknowledge Drs Julie Frazer and Liz Matias for their work in developing the Tree of Life approach at SLaM.
Citation
McDonald, C., Townsend, J. and Gillespie, C. (2024), "The “Team Tree” Professional Tree of Life intervention: development and evaluation within the acute inpatient psychiatric setting", Mental Health Review Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/MHRJ-06-2023-0029
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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