It is a great time for Irish Health and Social Care as Dr. Andy Phillips, the HSE Southwest Regional Executive Officer and Ms. Teresa McNally, CEO Irish HomeCare are the first in Ireland to sign the Compassionate Pledge and join other nations, writes Caroline O’Regan HMI, Executive Development Specialist, Graduate School of HealthCare Management at the Royal College of Surgeons.
What is the Compassionate Leadership Pledge and why is this important for Ireland? We know that our health and care services play a principal role in developing compassion, we in health and social care are the largest employer in Ireland, each person touching the lives of people at different stages of their lives. We also know that there is a worldwide crisis in health and social care with staff shortages, system pressures, infrastructural changes, and recovery from the pandemic, combining to overwhelm many services. There is a clear and urgent need to transform the cultures of our health and care systems and organisations.
The starting place is the core value that health and care staff embody every day in their work– the value of compassion. Compassion is a sensitivity to suffering with a commitment to prevent or alleviate it. Research over the last twenty years has shown that compassion is the single most important way in which we can affect the health and wellbeing of those we serve. It ensures higher quality and continually improving care with less financial cost Compassionomics | Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. The evidence tells us that compassionate leadership produces better care quality, staff retention, financial performance, patient satisfaction, and lower levels of avoidable patient deaths What Is Compassionate Leadership? | The King’s Fund (kingsfund.org.uk). The compassionate leadership movement is global, from the work of the Global Compassion Coalition Homepage – Global Compassion Coalition.
Signing The Compassionate Leadership pledge is basically making a commitment that organisations and individuals will create compassionate and inclusive workplace cultures by embedding each of the Compassionate Leadership Principles. These principles include being aware of others’ needs, practising active listening, and demonstrating respect and then taking collective action to help.
Compassionate leaders also encourage collaboration and a positive work environment. NEIW NHS Wales was the first nation to develop and sign up to the Compassionate leadership pledge. Other nations are now following this approach, Ireland included, and are signing to commit to develop and model compassionate leadership and create compassionate and collective cultures within their teams and organisations. The Pledge sets out how organisations and individuals will create a compassionate and inclusive workplace by describing how they can embed each of the Compassionate Leadership Principles. There are three ways in which you can commit to embedding cultures of compassionate leadership; at an Individual, reflect on how you, as an individual, embed each Compassionate Leadership Principles within your work. Team or Department, agree in collaboration as a team or department how each Compassionate Leadership Principle will be modelled and experienced within the team or department. Organisational, Executives within organisations can sign the pledge on behalf of their organisation and commit to creating compassionate workplaces and modelling compassionate leadership in all interactions. Benefits for signing the pledge include access to resources
Compassionate Leadership Pledge Template Pack. If you wish to sign the pledge click here Sign the Pledge.
The journey into this space started back in 2018 with a group of people from Five Nations who wanted to share best collective and compassionate leadership practices. I was privileged, alongside my colleague Tina Joyce RCSI and many HSE colleagues including Angela Hughes, to be part of this group when it was established to where we are today with the Global Compassion Coalition.
