Thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. I really appreciate your attendance here as I was driving here this morning, I just thought, wow, what a great opportunity to speak and to be a part of such an incredible day. So I really do appreciate your attention. So to start this story today, I’m going to actually ask you to close your eyes and imagine that you are a carer in a residential aged care facility and you receive a phone call from a family member. That family member wants to speak to your resident. You know that your resident has a severe cognitive impairment and significant word finding issues. Therefore, this conversation will likely be quite 1 sided. You obligingly facilitate this conversation by holding the phone to your residents ear. You hear attempts at engagement through asking questions about what the resident can see out the window, perhaps what they ate for lunch and hearing stories about what’s happening in that family members life where they live. As the conversation goes on, you can hear that it’s becoming more and more emotional, and by the end all you can hear down the end of the phone is a lot of tears. That resident is my pop or my granddad and I was the family member last Wednesday morning at 10:00 AM before between my meetings in tears after trying to speak with him. So I wonder how this story makes you think about your own connections with your family, whether that is lucky enough to be locally or afar. You can open your eyes now. I also have a wonderful second nephew who’s nearly nine months old, and I haven’t met him yet, but I look forward to giving him a big hug when I go home next year. So I know that I’m sharing my story from a position of privilege as a white middle class woman coming from an English speaking country, and there are a lot of our international recruits who have even more challenging stories than this. So why would I choose to give up these moments of in person connection with the people that I love and that I’ve known my whole life to come and work in England and work for the NHS. This is honestly one of the questions that I get on a weekly, if not daily basis and maybe if I lived in London or I was in Clapham, you know, it’s not as exotic to have an Australian in the wild, but I haven’t come across as many in Dorset. So as you may have already guessed from my accent or my hat that I am from Australia, I was born in Darwin in the Northern Territory and grew up in regional South Australia. I have two brothers, a sister and two beautiful nephews. Yes, we have warmer weather and our economics might be different, but the hospital challenges that we face, I swear, can be a copy and paste at times. When I first moved to UHD and I saw one of the executive emails about ramping, I do, I did feel like it was a deja vu from what I was experiencing in. Adelaide. So by sharing my story with you today, I would like to help answer that question of why have I chosen to stay working and living in England? Firstly, let’s think about why I moved here. So I wanted to adventure. I wanted to see what the UK had to offer and what Europe has to offer. I wanted to grow both personally and professionally. I thought maybe I might date a man with an English accent as well, that could be fun and I really wanted to work for the NHS. All of the leaders that I admire in the jobs that I had in South Australia had opportunities to work outside of a healthcare system of SA or even Australia. And they thought that that perspective that they were able to bring into their roles was really crucial to the type of leadership that they showed. So my NHS journey started as a speech and language therapist as a locum, without a plan to be there for more than a few months in Bournemouth Hospital on the stroke and Neuro Ward and this is really crucial to the first retention strategy, which I don’t know that UHD really knew that they were employing at the time but I was able to make connections with the clinicians that I was working with and those friends have meant that I’ve got people to go trail running in the Purbecks with get on a £40 return flight at Bournemouth Airport or have a coffee date in a bougie independent coffee store because I am from Australia right. So the second retention strategy is around growth, so I’ve had immense opportunities for professional growth since I started here. I was a band 6 locum as I mentioned, I did some workforce projects as a band 7 and then had the opportunity to work in a secondment project role with the AHP faculty in Dorset. This project gave me two protected days a week to read a lot of strategy from an NHS level and then from a regional level, really understand what the NHS has to offer and how we can access it. Also, just spend a bit of time understanding where I was geographically in the county. I also had the opportunity to support speak to many stakeholders who had done retention projects or focus on workforce within our region and outside of our region. Throughout this project I really found that there were lots of training opportunities. I was on a secondment position and there is funding, but sometimes it’s that coordination and the access to the funding so is it that I didn’t know this information because I was only new to the country and had only worked clinically? Or is there a mismatch between the information that sits on all of these wonderful web pages and I do have to be honest that it took me 6 months to find the National retention web page or is it because yeah, because there is that mismatch between. So how do we kind of break down those barriers and build that transparency between the business side of healthcare and our clinical side where we’re asking those frontline staff members to do a lot of the change? Throughout that time, I also had access to coaching, which I know some people are aware of, but a lot of people aren’t aware that you can access free coaching in a lot of the trusts within the NHS, and this fostered the opportunity for personal growth. The third retention strategy that I’ve been exposed to is compassionate leadership. So for me, that means offering a safe environment for learning and for risk taking and empowering those around you. And also incredibly empathetic leaders. So they know that sometimes I need to take a phone call at 10:00 because that’s actually a 6:30 PM time that suits my family back home. And I can work around that. And if we think about who a leader is in our organisation and refer back to Brené Brown, who is one of my big idols of leadership, her definition of leader is that a leader is anyone at any level who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential. So we have lots of different people here today who can bring a lot of the information that they’ve learned into their various roles and lead with that information when they go back. So the 4th retention strategy is around the fact that my career has been mapped to my values and my purpose. So my purpose as we heard is to create spaces for connection growth and learning. The fact that I have the opportunity to have a workforce team to give a voice to our Band 2 to 4s and bring our band 5s together from different organisations to learn and grow brings immense amount of joy. My values of curiosity, freedom, kindness and growth mean that I can ask questions, challenge processes and have the flexibility to work in various locations in various uniforms and in various time zones at times. So how can you learn from my experience of a no contract locum to a full time permanent staff member at UHD? I guess you could say a retention strategy for them. So firstly I want us to consider this quote and I remember finding it in the first month when I was applying to first work for the NHS. Health is all about people beyond the glittering surface of modern technology, the core space is occupied by the unique encounter between one set of people who need services and another who have been entrusted to deliver them. So we know our AHPs and our support staff and our administration staff proactively contribute to the healthcare system and our patients. So how do we ensure that our AHPs thrive? You could look at the retention strategies that worked for me, connection, growth, compassionate leadership and a career that matches my values and purpose. And then we can also consider the principles around transparency between the strategy and the people that we’re asking to take the action and make a promise that education and training is seen as business critical. So let’s revisit the reasons why I moved here. Did I achieve what I wanted to? So I’ve had the opportunity to travel a lot of Europe and I’m looking forward to seeing what the UK has to offer over the next few years. You can hear that I’ve had a lot of opportunity for personal and professional growth. I wanted to date an English man, safe to say I found that human and it’s controversial as it is to say here today he does have a northern accent and I think it’s divine. And 4th and finally I wanted to work for the NHS. So my two year anniversary is next Friday and I have another three-year visa starting and a permanent contract and I’m very grateful to be in a place that allows me a lot of opportunities. So in summary, our workforce are human beings. The strategies that support retention are as varied as the individuals we work with. However, being aware of the link between those little things and the thriving workforce is key for all leaders. The life and career that I’ve built in the UK is personal to my values and my purpose but provides me immense amount of satisfaction and engagement. So now we have a little bit of time. Let’s have a think about why do you work for the NHS? Why are you here today? And I’m probably preaching to the converted cause you’ve taken the opportunity to come here and learn and you’re, you know, often very passionate about your jobs. And what are your values and how are they embodied in your work every day, and what key actions can you do that start tomorrow or perhaps next week after the weekend that can support your team to thrive?