Imagine that you’re trying to bring a disparate group of workers together on an issue that is fundamental to your organisation.   There they are sitting in front of you: nurses, doctors, porters, managers, care workers, domestics.  You want to get the message across that it’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure that those using the service – in this case, patients and visitors – have as positive an experience as possible.  In particular, this means that people need to be treated with dignity and respect.

On one level of course, everyone will sign up to treat others with dignity and respect.  But is that really what happens?  No.  The truth is that like in any large organisation, people are busy, there are targets to meet and tasks to complete.  It can be difficult to make the patient’s experience central when there are so many pressures to streamline and objectify those being cared for.  So what do you do?  Well you can show what the patient’s journey is like from the patient’s perspective.  This is what The Woman on the Trolley does.  It tells the story of a woman’s arrival at A&E and eventual admission to a hospital ward.  There are various events along that journey when her dignity and respect are compromised by the inattention or carelessness of staff.

The ”woman” of the title remains in the room all day with the delegates, ’sitting in a waiting area’ or ‘lying on a trolley’ while they get on with their work.  We do this to remind them of the contrast between their own experience as busy workers and that of a patient lying in waiting.   In this way, delegates connect with how the service looks from the patient’s point of view, and that emotional understanding is then carried into their discussions of critical questions like:

• if you were receiving hospital treatment, how would you like to feel cared for?
• what are the things that create stress for you at work?
• what does it mean ‘to care’ in the context of your work?
• what do you think are the main things that leave patients/relatives feeling unhappy about their hospital care experience?
• what do patients/relatives really appreciate, that makes them feel ‘cared for’ by staff?

Delegates can sympathise with the “woman” and understand the attitudes, behaviours, practices, systems that impact on her experience.  They can leave with intentions about doing things differently.  Maybe they will and maybe they won’t.

But we can do more than this.  We can make this story live longer by using it to create a symbol that can then be used in lots of ways by the organisation to reinforce the key message.  In this case, the symbol took the form of a piece of cloth.  In the story it was this piece of cloth that the patient took out of her bag to comfort herself with.  She had taken it from her grandmother’s homemade quilt which, as a child, she had snuggled under when she was ill.   When she takes out the piece of cloth a member of staff remarks on it and the patient tells her what it means to her.  The nurse tells a similar story about a ‘silly thing’ that she keeps close to her.

A piece of this cloth was then given to each delegate at the conference.  Some people pinned it to the notice board where they worked or above their desk.  It was made into a poster that appeared around the hospital.

If you’d like to know more about this and similar work please contact me.