Introducing the Resilience Curriculum

A new series of workshops has been launched to help Court of Protection deputies boost their resilience and deal with the daily challenges of their vital role in neuro-rehab.

The Court of Protection appoints deputies to support individuals unable to make decisions for themselves on personal welfare, financial and property matters; including those living with brain injury.

Whether they are lay, or professionals such as solicitors, deputies perform a crucial function in enabling informed decision-making that best supports brain injury survivors lacking mental capacity.

Now the UK’s leading provider of arts therapies for neuro-rehab patients, Chroma, has teamed up with the Professional Deputies Forum (PDF) to launch a new project that aims to give them more support.

A professional deputyship can be a hugely challenging role, including as a result of the mental health and wellbeing pressures that often come with legal responsibilities.

Recent research by the charity LawCare, for example, shows that legal professionals are at a high risk of burnout, with 69 per cent saying they had experienced mental ill-health.

Only 56 per cent of these people said they had talked about their wellbeing at work with many citing fear of stigma and resulting career implications as a major reason.

Aiming to address these and other mental health and wellbeing-related challenges facing deputies, Chroma has launched the ‘Resilience Curriculum’; a series of online sessions running over the coming year, specifically for Court of Protection deputies.

In the case of clients living with brain injuries, conversations and phone calls can sometimes take a turn for the worse with professional deputies receiving verbal abuse that can have a lasting impact on their wellbeing.

The online workshops will explore the impact of work-related trauma that deputies have to listen to and handle on a day-to-day basis. The six sessions will also offer strategies and techniques for helping deputies bounce back and boost their resilience.

“There are significantly increased numbers of people in the legal profession that are experiencing challenges with mental health at work,” says Stacey Bryant, a member of PDF’s board of directors and partner at Enable Law which specialises in medical law, serious injury and mental capacity.

Stacey believes this is, in part, due to the rise in working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic left many office workers, including solicitors, working remotely for the first time in their careers.

“Pre-COVID, solicitors were quite traditional in the way we work,” Stacey continues. “Unless we were out and about seeing clients, we were sitting in offices with our colleagues. If you’re having to deal with an emotionally challenging situation for a client, you have your colleagues literally sitting there next to you.

“If you had a challenging phone call, which can be on many occasions abusive, people would hear that and they could put their proverbial arm around you and they could talk to you about it and support you with it.”

With many solicitors still working from home, these verbally abusive conversations and the emotional distress that comes with them, often go unnoticed. This is especially challenging for young professionals that are just starting out in the industry.

“Whilst we wouldn't want them to have to deal with those phone calls, you don't necessarily know when you answer the phone what you're going to get,” Stacey adds. “One client can be absolutely fine one minute and the next minute, not so much, particularly in the context of having had a brain injury.”

While larger firms may offer counselling services to their employees, most solicitors working for smaller companies are not given the opportunity to access these resources when their work becomes overwhelming. Chroma and PDF have partnered to help fill the gap and encourage firms to place more value on mental health and wellbeing.

Samantha Bossi, chief executive of the Professional Deputies Forum, says: "As research highlights, burnout can result in not being able to [perform] at work. This is genuinely a really important initiative to enable people with deputyship responsibilities to do their jobs, and do them well. Our members all have professional pride and this is really tied into that."

The six sessions that make up the Resilience Curriculum cover a range of topics, including fight, flight and freeze responses, supervision of staff, work-related trauma and therapeutic thinking. The aim is for participants to gain the tools they need to better support their team through the daily challenges of their work.

“It's a real sector-leading thing to come out and say, ‘look, everyone needs help, obviously we do’, and this is a great first step to providing that,” Daniel Thomas, MD of Chroma says.

“We're clear this is not a therapy session. It is a workshop around workplace learning. It's the start of an important conversation.”

The curriculum starts with a session on how to spot signs of stress and how to build a sense of resilience to manage these daily challenges.

Later sessions will explore the complexity of trauma and how supporting those with lived experience can, in some cases, lead to secondary trauma. The sessions will also help participants identify their own emotions and develop strategies to manage them.

“For lawyers, historically, it's embedded in us that we're so busy trying to find solutions for other people's problems, that you don't necessarily look at your own,” Stacey says.

“I think the PDF has been excellent at building this Court of Protection community around sharing best practice and supporting people if they've got a technical legal issue.

“The forum is usually quite active with people saying, ‘I've got this technical issue, what do people think’. I think it would be helpful if we can then expand that community so that people can feel that they can discuss these other challenges that inevitably they're going to be having.”

Moving forward, PDF and Chroma want to see the Resilience Curriculum become an ongoing resource that helps improve solicitors’ ability to tackle the mental health challenges that come with their job and get more people talking about their wellbeing.

“In terms of the future, if this first year goes well, we can then look to increase the amount of sessions that we do, but it's really about embedding that into the structure of what the PDF offers its members,” Daniel says.

“For people like Stacey [Byrant], who leads a fantastic, large team, what can that curriculum provide her in terms of opportunities to support her team? The curriculum can provide her with ideas, techniques and tips that she can pass on in formal supervision, but also in informal chats.

“This is something that the PDF and Chroma are doing jointly for all members of the forum, so it's a very significant step that we're taking together to really think about the work-related trauma that deputies and people involved in this work have to deal with on an everyday basis.”

For more information on the Resilience Curriculum contact training@wearechroma.com.