Data Sets for CaRE Project

Mental Health professionals working during the pandemic were exposed to multiple, sudden and dynamic personal and inter-personal stressors. As new protocols were implemented for managing COVID-19, this challenged some of the social and systemic norms teams usually depended upon to provide high-quality patient care. (Aughterson et al., 2021; Magner et al., 2021; Prescott et al., 2020). Exposure to deaths of patients, media communications, resource limitations and poor support mechanisms left some teams with compassion fatigue, burnout, and high sickness rates (Azadnajafabad, 2020; Cox, 2020; Silistraru, 2021; Sumner & Kinsella, 2021; Uphoff et al., 2021). Mental Health services in central and northwest London sought to use their expertise to support not only the patients who were most in need, but also members of staff who were adversely impacted by the pandemic (Havsteen-Franklin & Grant, 2020). This data describes the results of a questionnaire for teams working in physical and mental health care after engaging in team focused arts-based creative exercises to mobilise reflection, team bonding, role values and strategic priorities. The method used a thematic analysis to identify themes from the feedback about helpful and unhelpful factors. The helpful factors were identified by the majority of participants as (1) Safe and supportive facilitation, (2) Getting to know the team in a meaningful way, (3) Creative expression and reflection, (4) Communicating and processing difficult feelings and resistances, (5) Team equality. Unhelpful factors were (1) More time needed to process, (2) Not everyone was heard, (3) Difficult to engage in creative exercises.