Informal Workplace Support for Staff in Mental Health Care: Scoping Review Protocol

Abstract

Mental healthcare services in the UK National Health Service (NHS) face a growing workforce crisis, with high vacancy and turnover rates compared to other healthcare sectors, and increasing demands for care. Mental healthcare workers (MHCWs) encounter significant additional occupational stressors inherent to mental healthcare. Alongside workforce shortages and increasing workloads seen elsewhere, MHCWs provide significant emotional labour in caring for distressed patients, are frequently exposed to violence, and deliver coercive interventions. These occupational stressors are associated with adverse staff and patient outcomes, including poorer wellbeing and turnover intention. Therefore, workplace support is increasingly important to support staff wellbeing and workforce stability. Existing literature distinguishes formal support, such as clinical supervision, line management, and other forms of organisational support; and informal support, as supportive exchanges between colleagues that provide practical, emotional, and developmental support. While related terms exist within different professions, the literature remains conceptually fragmented and to our knowledge no prior research has synthesised informal workplace support across the diverse workforce and settings that form mental health care. This breadth of concepts suggests a scoping review is the most appropriate methodology. This scoping review aims to map the literature relating to informal workplace support for staff in mental healthcare settings including the forms of support, who provides them, and the workplace needs that prompt seeking support. This protocol uses the Joanna-Briggs Institute review framework alongside the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines, with systematic stakeholder consultation integrated in the methodology. Data will be charted, mapped, and presented with descriptive statistics. This is expected to provide the first comprehensive synthesis of informal workplace support in mental healthcare, which may be used to inform workforce wellbeing initiatives and future research.