Well it was an extraordinarily
busy week last week. I’m glad I have retired, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the
time to fit everything in. Amidst all the busy-ness, I found myself immensely distracted
by listening to last week’s Radio 4 programme, Start the Week, with Andrew Marr.
The focus was on Love and Unreason and featured, among others, Clare Carlisle,
who talked about the forthcoming publication of George Eliot’s translation of
Spinoza’s work ‘Ethics’. I was absolutely fascinated by the story. Mary Evans
(as she was then) first had to teach herself to read Latin, before translating
Spinoza’s work into English. This was in 1856, some 99 years before I was born.
Totally remarkable. Spinoza was a fascinating philosopher. In Ethics, he talks
about emotion, suggesting the essence of a human being is characterised by just
three emotions: Desire, Joy and Sadness. All other emotions are derivatives of
these three. Clare Carlisle is herself an expert on Spinoza’s work and it is through
her efforts that the new book will be published next February. Too late for a
Christmas present, but I know there is a certain wedding coming up in April…
just saying.
And of course, if you are also a
Radio 4 fan, I’m sure you will have been listening to George Eliot’s wonderful
Middlemarch – if you haven’t, I highly recommend you listen on catch up.
Tuesday was the first of a number
of meeting days. The last meeting was with the Care Quality Commission (CQC),
who were spending the week undertaking a ‘Well Led’ review of the Trust. It is
the second such review I have been part of in my time as a Non-Executive
Director at the hospital, but they are always different. We had prepared well
and as I knew I was to be interviewed, in part because I chair the Quality and
Safety Committee, something I have done for over five years now, I was fairly
confident. It was my favourite kind of interview; the type where the answers
are best constructed around the telling of stories. Although not to the same
level of complexity and intrigue as George Eliot’s work, there were many good
stories to tell.
The CQC attended our monthly
Board meeting the following day, and although the Part 1 of the Board was
fairly unexciting, it was good to see so many from the Council of Governors
there at the meeting. Part 2 was a little more exciting, because our new
Chief Executive (who has been in post a mere five weeks) set out the headlines
of where he saw the Trust going, and the elements we should be building our
strategy on. Interestingly, he believed that it would be demographics rather
than technology (or politics) that was likely to shape the future UK health
service. That said, I’m sure politics and technology will help us resolve the
growing problems posed by an ever increasing older population and the complex
health and social care needs they experience.
I met someone else later that day
who was also worried about demographics. I attended a workshop facilitated by
international expert in leadership, Professor Michael West. It was the second
time that week where I found myself spellbound listening to a softly spoken,
confident and knowledgeable person – the first was Clare Carlisle. Michael
West’s workshop was focused around compassionate leadership. I have read much
of his work, but had never heard him speak. He also had a fascinating story to
tell.
He took the workshop through the
four elements of being a compassionate leader. The first being the ability to ‘be
present’ – how many of us have been stopped by someone who wants ‘just 5 mins
of our time’ just as you are on your way to a meeting that starts in a few
minutes – your mind is on the meeting and that paper you haven’t yet read,
rather than being with the person in front of you; the second element was ‘listening
with fascination’, really working at hearing what’s being said (or not said);
the third element was ‘empathising’ – something that I personally feel is
really difficult to do, or to do well; and then lastly, asking how you might
help the person. These four elements, if used together, that is ‘compassion in action’,
will help shift the boundaries between our self and our self and others. I
didn’t know, but the simple act of asking and striving to help others actually
elicits a physiological reaction, particularly around the reward centres in our
brain. Michael posited whether we are actually hard wired for altruism. Maybe a
question for another blog posting.
I reflected on what he what he
has said and wondered if the moral distress many nurses experience is because
they perhaps feel that they can’t do what they should be doing to help others,
because of the sheer demand on services and the daily busy-ness of health care
today. It was Don Berwick who famously said that there should be only one rule
book, and that book should only have one rule: Do what you think is the right
thing.
Friday, I saw someone doing the
right thing. I went to my chemist, housed in my local health centre. It’s a
wonderful place. You can go for a swim, eat at the café, take a book out of the
library, use the gym, have a walk in the gardens, pick up a prescription, oh
and yes, if you want to, you can also see a GP or Advanced Nurse Practitioner. The chemist
had texted me to say my prescription was ready and I was interested to note a
new service, where I could elect to pick my prescription up 24 hours a day, 7
days a week, from an automatic hole in the wall dispenser. I immediately
thought this might be the solution to the problem of a retiree with time availability
issues.
And then I saw Kylie. She was
standing in front of the counter at the chemist and was having a heated
conversation with one of the assistants about her medication. She was clearly
distressed and becoming more so by the moment. I don’t know what the problem
was other than she had run out of her medication and the prescription for a new
lot hadn’t been signed off. The conversation became more heated and eventually,
Kylie stormed out. Without any hesitation, the assistant rushed after her,
caught her by the door and wrapping her arms around the young lady, gave a her
a hug, saying ‘come with her and she would sort things out’. They disappeared
into that little cubicle chemists have for ‘private consultations’ and as they
did so, the other assistants jumped into action to get one of the GPs (there
are always some at the health centre) to get the prescription signed off.
I don’t know what happened to
Kylie, but in terms of Michael West’s compassionate leadership, you couldn’t
have seen a better example of compassion in action.
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