Compassionate leadership was important to the National Rehabilitation Hospital because it echoed the ethos and values of the hospital, provided a structure for all and brought a number of initiatives together, the hospital’s CEO, June Stanley, told the Conference.
She was speaking on Leadership And Culture, Building Psychological Safety In High-Stakes Environments and The Role Of Compassionate Leadership.
Ms. Stanley said the importance of psychological safety was outlined in the literature. Psychological safety referred to the belief that you could speak up without fear of negative consequences of doing so. It had been found that to ensure psychological safety there needed to be meaningful engagement and empowerment.
Johnson et al (2016) found that health system reforms internationally focussed primarily on structural change rather than cultural change. (Lencioni, 2002) had outlined the five behaviour dysfunctions of a team. When teams lacked focus and clear objectives, team members stagnated, became distracted and focussed on themselves. Second-guessing and a lack of common objectives then led to an inability to develop standards for performance. Team members missed deadlines and delivered mediocre work . When teams became conflict-avoidant, a fear of failure developed. These teams had difficulty making decisions and second-guessed themselves. Lack of trust led to the fear of conflict. Employees worried more about politics and personal risk management than solving problems. Teams who lacked trust concealed weaknesses and mistakes and hesitated to ask for help.
The five behaviour dysfunctions of a team resulted in inattention to results, avoidance of accountability, lack of commitment, fear of conflict and absence of trust. A cohesive team on the other hand produced results, was accountable , committed .was prepared for healthy conflict and had trust.
Ms. Stanley said Compassionate Leadership was important in healthcare, because we were in a time of turbulence with new structures, new teams, we had recently come out of a number of years facing unprecedented challenges – e.g. COVID-19, new ways of working etc and change was constant – modern healthcare services needed to continuously evolve (Schram et al, 2022). Hospital change had many interdependencies and therefore was rarely a linear process (Pomare et al, 2021).
She said compassionate leadership was Listening, Understanding, Empathising and Supporting.
“The compassionate leadership pledge is an invitation to everyone working in healthcare to make their organization the most caring and supportive it can be. Anyone can sign it and they can do so on behalf of themselves, their department, or their entire organization. In signing the pledge, you commit to modelling compassionate leadership and team working and helping to create cultures of compassion within your team and organisation. ‘
Turning to the NRH Context 2020-2024, Ms. Stanley said patients had moved into the new National Rehabilitation Hospital and the hospital had gone live with InterSystems TrakCare, becoming the first in Ireland to implement the hosted ground-breaking patient information system.
As a result of introducing Compassionate Leadership in the NRH, they now had five Staff Wellbeing Pillars – physical, environmental, psychological social and spiritual. They had mapped the initiatives on to the pledge pillars, brought the various strands together and conducted a gap analysis on where they were now and where they aspired to be.
“We have identified ways of bridging the gap and we plan to undertake the RCSI C.A.L.F. programme to support our next phase.,” she said.
