Where has NWW come from?
NWW has been around for some years, but got particular impetus in mental health in 2003. This is when two national conferences for consultant psychiatrists summarised what they saw as the problems in their profession – significant difficulties recruiting and retaining psychiatrists because of the increasing demands of the role, increasing degrees of burnout among consultants, unsustainably high caseloads and crippling expenditure on agency locum doctors to try and plug the gaps. When these problems were examined, it quickly became apparent that because consultant psychiatrists were part of a system, and other parts of that system were demonstrating the same stresses (demonstrated, for example, in a study of social workers), all the parts of that system needed to be considered in order to effect change and produce sustainable jobs for all.
