Being Better, Together Learning from Excellence and Civility Saves Lives

Doctor Dan Jones is a cognitive psychologist at Reading University.  Dan has been involved in the LFE community for many years.  He has studied LFE in healthcare, and has implemented LFE in an academic setting in his university.  In this conversation (recorded live at our monthly LFE community call) we discuss Dan's recent paper on staff perceptions of LFE in the hospital setting, along with a host of other related topics including the negativity bias, the impact of public vs private positive feedback, the differences between written and verbal feedback, the pros and cons of standardisation of LFE, the problems with defining excellence, Dan's experiences of implementing LFE in a university setting, and other topics.

Dr Anna Baverstock is a consultant in community child health, and also a coach, mediator and schwarz round facilitator.  In this conversation, we discuss a range of topics relating to Anna’s work, including definitions of wellbeing; approaches to challenging conversations; mediation in healthcare; differentiating kindness from “niceness”; feedback and radical candour; how to encourage diversity in teams; and much more.





Anna's suggested reading list related to the topics in this conversation:


Brené Brown - Atlas of the heart
(Hear Anna's podcast on this book:
Atlas of the Heart (buzzsprout.com)
Kim Scott - Radical Candor
Stone & Heen - Thanks for the Feedback
Amy Edmundson - The Fearless Organisation 
Daniel Coyle - The Culture Code 
Marshall Rosenberg - non violent communication
Amanda Ripley - High Conflict
Adam Grant - Think Again
Timothy Clarke - 4 stages of psychological safety
Trzeciak & Mazzarelli - Compassionomics

This episode is a recording of a converwith Dr Bob Klaber. Bob is a paediatrician, and director of strategy, research and innovation at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. Bob also leads an initiative called Kindness in Healthcare, a global community of healthcare professionals who come together once a month to discuss and reflect on kindness in healthcare.
In this conversation we touch on a few areas, including: 

The work of Professor Leonard Berry in characterising kindness and healthcare, and demonstrating its benefits in terms of patient outcomes. 
Why and how we should measure kindess.
The impact of role-modelling on the behaviour of others.  
How to tackle unkind behaviours without being hostile. 
And much more... 

Along the way we draw parallels and shared learning with the work of Learning from Excellence and Civitlity Saves Lives.

Some references from the conversation:

An example of Prof Len Berry's work:
"Getting the measure of kindness", Carnegie UK.

This episode is a recording of our conversation with Janet Leighton, the "Director of Happiness" at Timpson's. In this conversation, Janet and Adrian discuss the origin of this role and what it involves, as well as many of the initiatives Timpsons have put in place to support their staff. They also discuss the Happy Index: Timpson's only Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Although Timpson's is a private company, we think there is much we can learn and apply from their approach to working in the NHS. It is clear that Timspons's promote staff autonomy, recognise and appreciate success, and offer support to staff during challenging times. It sounds like a good place to work.

Suzette Woodward has had a distinguished career in healthcare – in the clinical world as a PICU nurse, and then in a number of positions in patient safety, including a director role at the National Patient Safety Agency and as lead for the Sign up to Safety initiative.  In this conversation, Suzette reflects on her career in safety, and discusses opportunities for the future.  We cover a lot of topics, including: how to define safety; what constitutes good leadership; what we mean by culture; how safety-II 'fits' in the wider safety landscape; Vincent and Amalberti's 3-part model of safe systems (ultra-safe / high reliability / ultra-adaptive) and much more.  There are many highlights in this conversation, and there is a clear golden thread of compassion throughout Suzette’s career – she articulates a very clear desire to help others as the main motivation for her work.  Suzette reminds us that the reason we do this work is to help others, and that the envelope of concern includes the staff / colleagues as well as the patients.

Margaret Moore, MBA is the chair and co-founder of the Institute of Coaching: a non-profit organisation at McLean University, which aims to enhance "the integrity and credibility of the field of coaching".  This is a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation in which we discuss a broad scope of topics related to coaching, appreciative inquiry, and positive psychological approaches to our work and lives.  The conversation topics include: the role of coaching in healthcare (for patients and for professionals); the academic rigour behind coaching, and its growing evidence base; reflections on Learning from Excellence / Appreciative Inquiry and how this compares and contrasts with coaching; the elements of psychological capital - Hope Efficacy Resilience Optimism; burnout and wellbeing; and plenty more.
The book referenced by Margaret in the conversation (Coaching in Medical Education) is available here.