BMJ Leader session - Restoring 'care' and kindness in healthcare

The importance of Careful and Kind Care, and how to make it happen

Co-chairs: Dr Bob Klaber & Dr James Mountford, Editors—BMJLeader

Presenter: Dr Dominique Allwood, Consultant in Public Health and Associate Medical Director, Imperial College NHS Trust, London and CMO UCLPartners, London

The fundamental role of healthcare organisations ought to be to care for patients, meeting them on their terms. This is a human activity by which people with the capacity to care notice and respond well, with compassion and competence, to people who seek this care.

We explore how, instead, healthcare has industrialised care; with care degraded, care has become transactional. It has overwhelmed the capacity of both the people called to care and those that receive care, and has rendered care unsustainable

We propose that leaders can restore “care” by turning their organisations away from industrial healthcare and asserting their organisation’s purpose to enact careful and kind care. We will offer suggestions, with evidence, on ways to do this and encourage discussion and exploration across participants.

This session is anchored around the following 2001 BMJLeader publication: Leadership for careful and kind care | BMJ Leader