Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is a single site, medium sized hospital located within Kingston-upon-Thames in South West London. The Trust employs over 3000 staff, who care for 350,000 people locally and is rated overall ‘Outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission for quality, caring and for well led.
Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is a single site, medium sized hospital located within Kingston-upon-Thames in South West London. The Trust employs over 3000 staff, who care for 350,000 people locally and is rated overall ‘Outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission for quality, caring and for well led.
Many organisations are training teams of mediators with great success. These internal teams are ideally placed to deal with most issues at an early and less complex stage before a dispute becomes more serious and help their colleagues attempt to resolve their conflicts in a safe and informal setting.
Linda Dyson, Deputy Director of Workforce at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Timmy Kurtuldum, Training Manager at CiC recently partnered together to implement and roll out a new mediation service within the Trust.
Linda’s aim was to collaborate with Timmy to help embed strategies that aim to pro-actively manage conflict within the workplace and support employees through changes and challenges within the organisation.
“We wanted to be able to offer an informal route for employees to work through any issues and we wanted a long term strategy so we decided the best way forward was to train up our own internal team of mediators. Timmy was able to provide this solution. This means that where employee relations issues do arise, we can now resolve them quickly and promptly” said Linda Dyson, Deputy Director of Workforce.
Timmy worked closely with Linda to recruit 15 suitable candidates from across the organisation offering a diverse group of people from all levels and areas, developed the support services associated with this and delivered a five day mediation training.
Timmy wanted to ensure that she helped Kingston raise awareness and actively promote the mediation service across the Trust so she delivered an “Ambassadors to Mediation” course to HR, Union members and Leadership teams. The content looked at early conflict signs, the importance of early stage intervention and the process of mediation.
Together Kingston and CiC lay the foundations of the mediation services across the organisation.
“CiC has provided a dedicated approach to this entire process. Feedback from those attending the Mediation Training course and the Ambassadors Training was that they were both invaluable and will hopefully lead to the success of mediation within the organisation and an engaged and happy workforce.” – Linda
“It was a really exciting time to be part of this big roll out and work so closely with Kingston. They were proactive in their approach and open to all the recommendations I made for the programme. We developed a partnership approach to working together, developing and laying the foundations of a service that will support engagement and employee wellbeing as a long term strategy. It is good to see an organisation really doing something positive to manage any difficulties in a safe and supported environment.” – Timmy Kurtuldum