Working with Managers of a Long-Stay Service

Abstract

When I arrived at the hospital I asked the manager if, because of the part-time nature of my work, I could have regular meetings with her to catch up on events in the hospital between my visits. She agreed to weekly meetings. As time went by she came to value these meetings as opportunities for herself to reflect on the management issues. The meetings had evolved into consultations. In my second year, when the manager was on holiday she asked me to see her new deputy manager, and later the deputy asked if she too could see me on a weekly basis. These meetings became an important part of my work and I came to see my task in this consultation role as essentially thinking and offering understanding about the anxieties, conscious and unconscious, which the manager and her deputy had to manage: the staff’s, the patients’, the relatives’ and their own.