Radical thinking or is it?

           Is Radical the new Common Sense?

written last year before I discovered #SHCR

After 30 + years directing and producing in the corporate arena I decided to see if my acquired skills would benefit the Care, Health and Social Housing sectors. The work was far more rewarding and there was and is a genuine chance to “make a difference”.

As I began to immerse myself in these sectors the serial problem solver in me saw opportunities where a bit of lateral thinking and not knowing what I couldn't do led to concepts popping up where I was challenging the conventional wisdom for the benefit of all.

All well and good until I tried to take these ideas forward, the NHS is such a sprawling and complex entity it was always impossible to find a way in. I had more success in the care sector, having won at a Skills for Care tender I produced a recruitment tool for identifying applicants for carer roles who had that “special thing” a compassionate nature.

They are the ones who get real job satisfaction and always put the patient first without the need to be trained to do so, it’s a human instinct for them.

I count myself as one of them and believe that if it’s “not in you” it can be a hard trait to even recognise for many, let alone place the real value in those qualities that I believe one should. So if you can’t spot that quality in people at the recruitment phase then everything that follows becomes process driven to compensate and we are where we are post Francis. 

I don't believe for example that training nurses to be more compassionate was the right response, they just needed enabling as that was the reason they chose the to be a nurse, they were born to care in the vast majority of cases. 

Too much process also means people loose ownership of their role and the obsession with hierarchies and the toxic combination of financial pressures chocked off internal communication, there was a one way valve only allowing communication to flow downwards.

So as I see it, innovation, creative problem solving, ownership of your role and any form of "risk taking" to challenge the conventional wisdom to improve patient experiences and outcomes was killed off. “I will never get that past my manager” became the mantra as did bullying cultures and all the negative fallout that generates. 

As an outsider the prevailing culture in recent years has been that people like me who might have positive things to offer can't be heard. After all what could someone with no medical or academic experience have to offer? So over the last few years I have tried and failed to present simple common sense solutions to anyone in the NHS...sure you know where this is going:) 

Given I am not a spring chicken and have definitely experienced ageism in recent years, at the age of 60 going to an event where Helen Bevan quite exquisitely described the attributes of people like me, so called  “citizen radicals” who could be trusted and whose ideas were based on common sense & experience was liberating.

To put that in context I have for the past 18 months put my heart and soul in to creating a suicide prevention tool for people with a learning disability. Getting people to test it and feedback was a slog and the NHS remained like Fort Knox.

Within 7 days of attending the NewHCVoices event in Birmingham I am now having to slow everyone down from helping me so I don’t waste this fantastic opportunity to create a meaningful evidence base for the project so it has the support to go national and hopefully help save more lives.

Then within a few months Jodi tweeted me an invite to join SHCR as a student,has turned my perceptions of the NHS on it's head. This organsiational change in mentality, acknowledgement of the value of "people wisdom" and open door approach to embracing new ways of thinking and bringing about positive change is to my mind one of the biggest and most positive things the NHS has ever done to improve itself.

It is possible.

@Chicustard