Beware the Temple of Zoom, but remember that kindness matters (as do sunflowers)

I exchanged a thought or two with folk last week about how depressing it’s starting to feel with the ever increasing number of Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings I’m taking part in. Over the last few weeks, it has felt like most of my days have been taken up with such meetings. Globally, the use of applications like Zoom and Teams has grown exponentially since the start of the Covid19 pandemic. I was originally a great advocate for using this technology, and wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity to communicate and interact with others in this way. Several months in, I’m thinking that the increased use of such platforms, whilst being great for shareholders, might not be so good for our mental health and wellbeing.

Whilst not having to travel to our places of work has admittedly been a time (and petrol) saver, it has meant that those corridor or water cooler conversations, the quick ‘have you got 5 minutes?’ informal meetings, the chance encounters with different folk have been lost. These everyday interactions appear to me to have been replaced with a growing number of often lengthy online video meetings. My calendar and email inbox are crammed full of ‘Join Microsoft Teams Meeting’ and or ‘Zoom Invitation’ requests. I’m not a technology dinosaur but managing these requests is rapidly becoming a bit of a stealthy thief of my time. Of course, I know, I could be like Indiana Jones, and when I'm asked to join a meeting, could respond with a ‘Maybe. But not today’ – but somehow in the absence of those informal opportunities to meet up with others, saying ‘no’ feels a little harder to do. And so, the busyness continues.   

However, sometimes in the midst of our everyday busyness, an oasis of calm can appear. A week ago, one of my colleagues from the fabulous #earlyrisersclub - Tina South, contacted me to ask if I would speak with her students about a recent blog I had posted. I was happy to. The World Health Organisation has designated 2020 as the International Year of The Nurse and Midwife, and this seemed a good way of acknowledging the contribution both professions make. After arranging a date and time and using Collaborate (like Zoom and Teams) I was able to meet with Tina and her students last Friday. In a week of intense online meetings, it was a fabulously different encounter.  

The students on the call were all Midwifery students. Tina had asked me to share some of my experiences of being a student nurse, becoming a qualified nurse, my NHS career journey and my transition to academia as Dean of a large health professions School. Interestingly for me at least, I felt very comfortable describing my journey and the many wonderful midwives I met along the way.

It was a journey that touched upon the first midwife I ever met, someone who assisted at the birth of my eldest child, which was a long time ago now. It continued through to stories of some of the midwives I had come into contact with over the past 25 years in Higher Education. My earliest and one of my fondest memories of this time was of two midwives who worked for an NHS Trust in Greater Manchester; one of whom was Val Finigan. They both undertook a distance learning degree which had face-to-face study days. Every assignment Val wrote focused on breastfeeding. I learnt more about breastfeeding than I ever needed to, However the work she and her colleague did led to their NHS Trust gaining the UNICEF Baby Friendly Accreditation, and possibly one of the first in the UK to do so.

Interestingly, many years later, the midwives in our School did exactly the same thing, and again were one of the first universities in England to gain this accreditation. That work was led by our Director of Midwifery, Lesley Choucri, a remarkable woman who provided exemplary leadership to our midwifery team and the wider professions and was someone who was always willing to take on a challenge; one of which was to take the counselling and psychotherapy colleagues under her wing. She did well, and in the words of Donald Winnicott, she was absolutely a ‘good enough Mother’ to 100s of students.

During her tenure, I appointed our first professor of Midwifery, Caroline (CJ) Hollins Martin. This inspirational woman and I got off to a great partnership (and friendship) from our first meeting. She is the only person I know who attended and conducted her interview with a magic wand in her hand. She is now working at Edinburgh Napier University, and doing great things around maternal health. CJ was as passionate as I was about the Birth Rites art collection we were privileged to house in the School. This was a magnificent collection of art (in all forms of media) that depicted and explored the notion of who controls the process of childbirth and early motherhood. It was a Marmite kind of collection. Some found the images too provocative, while others, me included, found the work powerful and evocative. Sadly, after I left the School, the entire collection was moved to Kings College in London, where it can be found today – well worth a visit if you happen to be down that way.     

My last midwifery story was of a visit to our student midwives on a clinical placement in Uganda – I was so proud to see their professionalism, compassion and care, in what can only be described as very primitive field hospital conditions. What also impressed me was their acknowledgement that they were able to use ‘basic skills’ acquired early on in their training, and use them to good effect. It was something they thought had been lost in a more technically and governance-structured NHS.

I finished the session by taking the group through what is involved in becoming a blogger, and gaining a voice on social media. There was some practical advice, but I used the particular blog to share how writing in this way can help in resolving personal confusion over sometimes very complex issues. The session was somewhat of a soliloquy, but goodness did it give me much to reflect upon. In particular what I/we in health and social care might be doing to deal with the issues surfaced so powerfully by the global #BLM protests. But that will have to wait for a different blog posting.

Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to Tina. Not only did she provide me with a unique opportunity to speak with the next generation of midwives, but at the end of her very long day, took a huge bunch of flowers around to my elderly parents. Like her, they also live in Cardiff and J and I have not been able to visit them since lockdown. It was her way of saying thank you – and it was a wonderful act of kindness that cuts right across the virtual world of communication in such a positive and powerful way. My Mum and Dad were knocked out by Tina’s kindness. Thank You Tina.