Rainforest Ward Lincoln County Hospital
Introducing Rainforest’s Christmas staff appreciation and Thank You , helping to boost staff engagement and making the team feel valued.
About five years ago new to band 6 postings we came up with the idea of showing staff how much we value them by offering them a special thank you at Christmas time.
This simple idea involves each of our band 6’s, our band 7 and band 8 putting some money together to buy gifts, and make some hampers.
We put up at Christmas tree in the staff room and underneath it we put presents for staff to help themselves, they each also get a card with a personalised message of thanks and a raffle ticket for a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize hamper.
We also include our regular agency and bank staff in this as they are also such an important part of our team.
And over the past couple of years we have also received a gift and card back from the team which has been lovely.
Some gift ideas over the years have included, chocolates, a pen with a message on, diary’s, photo magnets for staff lockers , and this year in keeping with the theme Carrie brilliantly came up with the idea of personalised hand Sanitiser bottles . This was hugely popular amongst staff , not only can they be re-filled but people likened them to the water bottles in love island so that’s made everyone’s day.
Because it had been a very different year in 2020, we also wanted to recognise our staff for the frontline hero’s they are and the vital role they have played during this pandemic by giving them some memory keepsakes to recognise them as true hero’s. Although we have seen children with covid we haven’t seen large numbers that our adult colleagues have, but to support them and other services within our hospital we have adapted our way of working to help with a&e flow and we have also been working in other areas of the hospital to support them .
Covid meant that this year we were not allowed Christmas trees on our ward so as an alternative we made a tree out of card and each bauble on the tree had a member of staffs name on it.
During the shift of 20th Dec everyone on duty that day got involved to put this together, it was a real team effort and lots of fun.
This year also Carol our Brilliant ward manager bought us a basket of gifts for our staff room as a special thank you.
On Christmas Eve we ask our on call consultant to pick out the first prize raffle ticket , and other staff working on the ward choose the 2nd and 3rd prize winners which are announce on our Rainforest Family Facebook page .
We will continue this simple but effective staff morale and engagement booster each year, although we seem to have to start earlier each year thinking of new ideas and different things to do , but that challenge makes it more fun and worthwhile in the long run.
Rainforest family would like to say a huge thank you to all of our hero colleagues within ULHT and within the NHS for your continued hard work and dedication.
You are all amazing
We’re all in this together 🌈❤️.