Care Resilience Case Study: How 120 Staff Started Talking Earlier About Wellbeing

From “crack on” to “how are you, really?”

What a resilience programme changed for one care group

Care work runs on goodwill. People turn up, look after others and keep going. Ask how they’re doing and the answer is usually “fine”. Then “crack on”.

That’s admirable. It’s also how good people burn out.

Across Great Britain, 22.1 million working days were lost to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25 (HSE). In care, where the work is emotional and staffing is tight, that pressure lands hard.

This year, a care group with five services and around 120 staff asked me to help. Here’s what we did, and what’s changed.

Start by listening

Before designing anything, we ran a staff survey. 66 people responded.

It gave us an honest picture: where the pressure was building, how comfortable people felt speaking up, and how early wellbeing conversations were really happening.

I didn’t want to arrive with a packaged course. I wanted to build something around what staff told us.

Two tracks, side by side

Road to Resilience runs for all staff, across 14 cohorts. Practical three-hour sessions on what resilience really is, building your own resilience plan, and creating teams where people speak up and support each other.

Leading Wellbeing is a five-session track for care home managers. Managers set the tone, so this track focuses on confident, early conversations, visible leadership and a coaching approach.

A few design choices made a real difference:

•       Exercise-led, not lecture-led. Care staff spend their days doing. Sessions should too.

•       Buddy check-ins between sessions. Ten to fifteen minutes with a colleague, so the learning gets used on the floor.

•       Take-away cards. Simple prompts people can keep in a pocket.

•       Plain English throughout. No jargon, no psychobabble.

What’s changed

Four months in, we ran the survey again.

•       Staff saying wellbeing conversations happen early in their team rose from 52% to 71%.

•       No one now says those conversations don’t happen early.

•       93% feel comfortable talking to their manager if they’re struggling.

The shift we’re after is simple: from “crack on” to “how are you, really?”. The numbers say it’s happening.

What any organisation can take from this

1.    Measure before you start. Otherwise you’re guessing, and you’ll never know if it worked.

2.    Don’t just train staff. Equip managers. People take their cue from the person they report to.

3.    Make it stick between sessions. The real work happens on a Tuesday afternoon shift, not in the training room.

4.    Keep it practical. If people can’t use it tomorrow, it won’t last.

Is your team running on goodwill?

Whether you’re in care, education, policing, a charity or a busy professional firm, the pattern is the same. Good people keep going until they can’t.

If that sounds familiar, let’s talk. Book a 30-minute call, no pitch, just a conversation about what’s going on.