What does it mean as a ward team to acknowledge the fundamental healthcare inequities faced by your patients? What does it mean as an individual to recognise your own assumptions about race and privilege? And how to do this in a way that is both compassionate and challenging for all involved?

This interactive session will offer an immersive flavour of the cultural competence and anti-racism training co-produced by clinical colleagues and lived experience practitioners at Forest Lodge low secure inpatient unit, part of Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust.

The training addresses differentiated power dynamics, white privilege and structural racism, and explores how these manifest in inpatient mental health settings, which have a particularly complex institutional legacy.

The Forest Lodge team rolled out their training programme to all colleagues on the ward and inspired other teams to adopt and adapt the training to their own ward contexts. The team also trained the trust’s executive leaders, in a reverse mentoring style of working.

Forest Lodge was one of over 50 teams across England to take part in the National Mental Health Act Quality Improvement Programme, commissioned by NHS England and jointly delivered by Virginia Mason Institute and The PSC.