Sam James, an acting team manager in the Children’s and Adults’ Occupational Therapy and Sensory Service, was nominated by a member of her team.
Watch to the end of this special video and you'll see Sam talking about her role:
Hi Sam, could you tell us about your role?
My job involves a lot of the daily running of the service, so making sure that all staff have allocated cases, we look at the overarching strategic and operational workings to ensure that we have consistency throughout the entire service.
Some of the projects I’ve been involved with recently – we've been very much looking at business plans in terms of children’s occupational therapy and what we can bring to the service. I’ve also been involved in a lot of quality assurance work as well, in terms of case audit and looking at our front door services and how that works. (We’re) looking at a more preventative model as opposed to a more reactive model.
A member of your team took the time to nominate you for your leadership – that must feel pretty good, right?
It’s such an honour to be recognised for this award.
It really has been a difficult 12 months for our service. There’s been a lot of change, there’s been a lot of transformation and I think, for me personally, there’s been a lot going on outside of work. To be recognised by my own staff and by my own peers for this sort of work, especially in leadership, has been incredible.
It sounds like you have a great relationship with your team! How do you feel about them, and who else deserves a shout out?
I would like to thank my entire team because we’d be completely and utterly lost without them. They have taken on and shown so much resilience. Again, there’s been so much change in the service, and we’re such a small team as well – but yet we’re needed in so many different places. I don’t think we’re recognised as a service enough!
But also, senior management as well, and my service manager – we'd be lost without them too.
What would you say is the best thing about being at Sefton Council?
I do love the culture that we have here, especially in Adult Social Care. If a mistake is made, there are always lessons learned, but there’s no blame culture. We all very much work as a team and try to come up with the answers as a cohesive service rather than just one person trying to deal with certain situations.
And that goes all the way up – not just from frontline staff, that’s all the way through different levels of management. You always feel that you have that support if something has gone wrong. It’s a really good culture, and a hard culture to embed as well!