This week’s leadership message comes from Mr Neeraj Bhasin, Consultant Vascular Surgeon at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust

Hello, my name is Neeraj

I feel really privileged to be doing my second blog for the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership.

When considering the content and theme of this blog, it was the first time in a while that I’ve paused and reflected on recent events. It’s clearly been an immensely difficult time for everyone, both personally and professionally with COVID. Every Friday’s blog or podcast showcases how individuals working within the partnership are absolutely dedicated to providing the best care and services we can to the community we both serve, and live in. However, on this occasion I wanted to make our team the focus, more specifically, looking after our own individual physical and mental wellbeing.

In current times, the normal mechanisms we would have routinely use for maintaining our physical and mental wellbeing may not be available, accessible, or even worked like they have before. More than ever, we need to find something in these stressful times that does work It’s about trying something different in very different times to help your wellbeing.

As a vascular surgeon within this Health and Care Partnership, I treat ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms. A condition where the main blood vessel in the body (the aorta) enlarges over years and can then start to leak blood internally. As this is a large blood vessel, this is an immediately life-threatening issue which needs emergency surgery. Similarly to what we are experiencing currently, this is obviously a distressing situation for the patient and families, but also takes a toll on us working in the healthcare system.

About 3 years ago, a few days after operating on a patient who presented with this issue, I realised I was still unsettled by it - for some reason I hadn’t been able to deal with it as I had done before. So, I decided to do something different and wrote a poem.

I hadn’t written a poem since I had to for my English GCSE, and that was a long, long time ago! I don’t know why, but I wanted to do something different and I was hesitant. My role meant that I was relatively fixed in a how I acted, reflected, and dealt with stressful situations, and this was compounded by feeling embarrassed as I felt others would perceive that it would be strange for me to do something like write a poem (I suppose you could say that I was ‘pigeon holed’). My role sometimes meant that I didn’t deal with things at all at times, as I felt leading the team that I should appear impenetrable and simply continue to ‘do my job’.

I tentatively shared the poem at the time and it seemed to receive a positive response from clinical and non-clinical colleagues and friends. So, still nervously, I share the link to what it a very personal reflection on dealing with this serious emergency condition. I hope you do read this short poem as it may give you an unusual and unique insight, through my eyes, of a small facet of care we deliver in our healthcare partnership. More importantly, I hope it makes you think of doing something different to improve your wellbeing that you may have considered, but have not had the confidence to try:

https://neerajbhasin.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/the-darkness-is-coming/

Now, when I’m asked to see a patient who presents with this condition, I have this in my mind and I believe it improves my response to the situation.

More recently in the COVID era, I was reminded of the above poem as it felt relevant, it also reminded me of the need to try something different when I was challenged by events.

Clearly, kindness from others has been hugely comforting and the ‘care for those who provide care’ provided through so many routes has been incredible and humbling, alongside genuine peer-support. In addition, a number of formal national and local physical and mental wellbeing support systems were set up and I would still encourage anyone to engage with these resources to not be hesitant. If you’ve thought ‘should I try it?’, then I recommend you do.

In recent times I have explored and embraced alternative options and found it so rewarding. For my physical wellbeing I have done kangaroo jumps and fought dragons with my wife and boys in front of the television doing PE with Joe Wicks. I’ve used the Headspace app, I went back to the writing and actually wrote a brief reflective journal note at the end of each day for 3 weeks. I put time in my diary to have a video call with a colleague with no agenda other than to catch up. All things I’d never done before.

As mentioned, I would encourage anyone to engage with the resources that are available now. As the COVID curve was rising I was very conflicted where, on one hand, as a clinical leader, I felt I should be at the tip of the spearhead of the clinical response and a feeling of guilt if I wasn’t. However, that was countered by the fear of knowing that, at that point, approximately 94% of doctors who had tragically died were of a BAME background and I was worried about my wife and children. This was a constant pressure, but through our local organisational resource I tried a coaching session and committed to the process. It was fantastic in changing my perspective around those emotions but also equipped me with skills for all aspects of my current and future work.

I appreciate this is a very personal blog and doesn’t describe a development, improvement or process within the Partnership. On reflection I felt it was important to openly write about the fact that ‘it’s OK not to be OK’. I’ve been fortunate that nothing I have described above became a major issue, but that’s because of the kindness of others and trying different things. As I said right at the beginning, although these are my personal experiences, I expect it’s the same for a number of us in this partnership.

We all strive to improve the health and care of our community but we have to ensure we care for ourselves and are kind to our colleagues. Ultimately, that will make us more resilient and happy, and more able to provide even better quality care to others. If your normal wellbeing mechanisms aren’t working or available, it may feel uncomfortable initially, but try something different: run, paint, knit, cook, sing, dance, write – you may surprise yourself!