Tears in Heaven: The being and doing of being a health and social care professional

Yesterday morning, young J asked what I would be writing this week’s blog on. My response was that I had no idea. I had thought about something to do with ‘Tears in Heaven’, but wasn’t really sure. More of which later. Perhaps. Certainly, there was plenty last week that should have stirred my imagination. For example, there was the Russian monkey business around the effectiveness of a Covid-19 vaccine, somewhat akin to that 1802 reaction to the smallpox vaccine which was based upon a cowpox vaccine.

Then there was Jake Jacob Gilchrist Berry, Conservative MP for Rossendale and Darwin, (there are other political parties) who last week wanted to re-open the Chorley A&E department. How? By ‘re-locating’ staff from the other three acute hospitals across the Lancashire and South Cumbria Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP)! I think that Jake possibly went to the same School of Thought as whoever it was that dreamt up the Nightingale Hospitals in the first place. In London, only 51 patients were ever treated at the 4000 bed Nightingale Hospital before it was mothballed. Why was this? Well the main reason was there were no staff to run the facility. All available staff were already working in the London acute sector.  

However, after a busy week of virtual meetings, I was feeling a little uninspired and fed up. Additionally, it would be churlish and possibly career-damaging to unpack the stupidity of this situation. So, I won’t go there, although making this decision did little to improve my state of mind. Given my age, I should have been full of vim and vigour and laughing all the way from the first word typed to this week’s completed blog.

How do I know this? Well last week the Times published a story that drew on the work by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, originally published in 2017, that suggested that we start to lose our sense of humour around the age of 23. For many folk, it’s an age where having joined the ranks of the employed, we start to become serious, and in some cases, important people. I have never felt the latter, albeit I have been privileged to work in many roles of high responsibility and accountability. I have also always felt it was important to be able to have fun while at work. Humour has often been the glue that has bound the teams I worked in together when times were tough.

The Stanford research reported that the average person aged 40 took 10 weeks to laugh as much as a four-year old does in a single day. It is only people like me, who on reaching retirement age, regain our ability to giggle, laugh and find things funny. The researchers argue that is shouldn’t be like that. They argued that, in organisations, humour can be both powerful and important in managing change, building innovative and effective cultures, achieving business objectives and vitally important for maintaining our well-being. The researchers’ aim was to promote the notion that humour can bring with it a sense of humanity, humility and a different kind of intellectual perspective.

Actually, you don’t need to read the research to perhaps understand this idea. Here is a trailer for a film, that if you haven’t already seen, you can get on Amazon (of course, other streaming services are available); sit down and watch it. I can guarantee that it will both make you laugh out aloud, and make you think about what is important in life. It also stars my doppelganger.

And goodness, as we enter the second Covid-19 surge, with Winter just around the corner, and appear to be on the brink of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit. do we need something to lift our spirits. One of my daughters, a single mum with two young children, spoke with me on the phone yesterday saying she didn’t think she could face a second lockdown on her own again. It’s a cry that I think will be echoed in households up and down the UK. I think the impact of the three Tiers will lead to many more tears being shed over the next few months, and not just by folk like my daughter. Healthcare professionals, wherever they are working, will already be feeling the impact of the second Covid-19 surge.

This was something I thought much about last Friday. As I noted above, Friday was the end of a very busy work for both J and myself. As we sat in front of the first log fire of the autumn, listening to music, sipping wine and generally chilling out. One of the songs that came on was Eric Clapton singing ‘Tears in Heaven’. It was one of those moments when the words you are listening to take on a different meaning. Eric Clapton has written 131 songs, but apart from ‘Layla’, this is the one that sticks in my mind. It was written as a way of capturing his feelings following the tragic death of his four-year old son who fell from the 53rd floor of a New York apartment in 1991.

There was a line I the song that resonated with me and where we find ourselves at present:

‘Would you hold my hand

If I saw you in heaven?’

During the first lockdown, I wrote a blog about the importance of touch. You can re-read it here. The stimulus for writing that particular blog was the knowledge that many nurses were often the last person someone with Covid-19 would feel near them as they died. A physical touch seems to me to be an important, if not a critical element in such situations. As we once again restrict people visiting their loved ones in hospital, I hope our nurses and others remain there for their patients at time when they need to feel the caring presence of another. As I argued in that April blog, touch in many ways captures both the ‘doing’ and ‘being’ of nursing. Other health and social care professionals are available, but all will understand, appreciate and practice the notion of touch: ‘Would (or will) you hold my hand?’.