Elysium Operational Graduate Hannah Eden-Donoghue is currently on the second rotation of the Elysium Graduate Programme. She tells us a little about herself and one of the projects she has undertaken as part of the programme, one that focuses on healthy eating.
“I graduated last summer from the University of Huddersfield after completing my degree in Health and Social Care, and I have been able to apply all the skills I learned in the Elysium Graduate Programme.
“My first graduate rotation was regionally based, which helped me get a good feel for the different sites and really understand the different disciplines and services we have at Elysium. A big part of the first two months was understanding the terminology and spending time visiting our services.
“When I was working in the Midlands and Yorkshire, I was set a project to research healthy living in our mental health services. I was tasked with looking at the issues and challenges we face, as well as finding areas of good practice which could be shared across the company.
“I found there is a lot of really good work being done at our sites around promoting healthy living and healthy eating. There are ‘fakeaway’ meal sessions, for example, which are a great way of encouraging healthy eating and gaining cooking skills to create healthy meals.
“Some services have Healthy Living Awards for the people we support. Another service promotes dog walking at a local dog shelter – people are out getting exercise and getting their steps in, without even realising they are exercising at all.
“I presented my findings at the Regional Clinical Governance meeting and highlighted those great examples. There are real opportunities for our teams to learn from each other about how we can best promote the healthy meals on offer, activities taking place, and encourage service users to get involved.
“Following my research, I recommended setting up a Healthy Living Rewards Framework for sites to use to be able to take inspiration from. The framework includes examples of what they might give awards for, and many aspects can be co-produced with the people we support.
“I’m also working on creating a healthy living resource hub; an easy place for our staff to access resources such as an ‘Eat Well Plate’, ‘Exercise Plans’ and other simple documents, to use with the people we support and encourage healthy lifestyles.
“It was really rewarding leading on this project, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how we can continue to move the findings forward into effective action.”