Every month Kindness in Healthcare community members from around the world come together for a Conversation for Kindness, for conversation and reflections about kindness in healthcare. Each conversation has a focus on listening, learning, thinking differently and mobilising for action, and an open culture of sharing resources, ideas and energy.
Guest speakers usually lead the conversation before members divide into smaller break-out groups for further reflection.
Meeting are held on the third Thursday of the month, at 6pm UK time. All are welcome – if you would like to join, please contact us.
Below you can see insights, presentations and videos from the meetings.
April 2024 – The role of kindness in the British Red Cross
This month we heard from the British Red Cross about the role of kindness in their work.
We were joined by: Lisa Hollins, Executive Director, UK services, Victoria Corbishley, Director for Health, and Helen O’Connor, Head of Community Education.
In response, the group discussed the role of kindness in building community resilience, in relation to coping with crisis.
Download the insights and summary of the conversation
Watch the conversation below
March 2024 – Follow Your Compassion
Our conversation this month focused on Follow Your Compassion, an ethnographic record about the lived experience of newly qualified and registered nurses and midwives in the UK.
Participants kept a journal of what it was like to walk in their shoes and their experience of kindness and compassion in the workplace.
Our speakers were Dharaa Patel and Simon Newitt from The King’s Fund, along with Kiara, Sage, Karen and Rosemary, midwives and nurses who participated in the Follow Your Compassion project.
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Watch the conversation below
February 2024 – Using ‘Clean Language’ to achieve better and kinder conversations in healthcare
This month we were joined by the team behind the Clean Language movement, Dr Hesham Abdalla, Judy Rees, and Steve McCann. We heard about their ambition to empower a million health and care professionals with this counter-intuitive approach, and learned how Clean Language facilitates more effective, compassionate communication.
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Watch the conversation below
January 2024 – Kindness in education
Our conversation was led Dr Sanjiv Ahluwalia, Professor of Primary Care and Medical Education and Head of Anglia Ruskin School of Medicine. He has a special interest in understanding the influence of clinical education on patient care.
He reflected on growing evidence that as students go through medical school as undergraduates, their levels of empathy diminish over time. Similarly, it is known that there are significant levels of unhappiness for postgraduate doctors throughout their training.
We then discussed two key questions: how could we better prepare students to be kind and understand the value of kindness for sustainable and better patient care? And how do we encourage kindness towards students along their journey?
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Watch the conversation below.
December 2023 – Compassion and kindness in leadership
For this Conversation, we were joined by Professor Michael West who spoke on compassion and kindness in leadership.
Michael first discussed the relationship between happiness and work. He spent time exploring what compassion actually means, and looked at the challenge of creating the conditions for compassion inside our healthcare environments.
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Watch the conversation below.
November 2023 – Kindness and psychological safety
Our conversation was led by Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, who is renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety.
Her work focuses on the study of interpersonal relationships, underpinned by the belief that this has a great impact on organisational development.
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Watch the conversation below.
October 2023 – 36 months of conversations so far
Our purpose in coming together for this session was to get feedback from members of the Kindness in Healthcare community on the future direction and priorities of the group. We wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts on where we should focus our efforts going forward.
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Watch the conversation below
September 2023 – Kindness and our education systems
James Mountford, founder of the London Interdisciplinary School, coordinated this conversation. For the first time as a group, our topic shifted away from healthcare and into education.
We heard from two speakers, Ed Fidoe and James Handscombe, who both spoke to their experiences with kindness in different educational settings.
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August 2023 – Exploring the role of education and learning in building kindness
The session centred on the role of education, training, learning and teaching in and around the topic of kindness. Bob Klaber and Maureen Bisognano led the discussion.
Download the insights and summary of the conversation.
Watch the conversation below
July 2023 – Detoxifying healthcare: leading practically with and for kindness
This month, we discussed practical applications of kindness, specifically breaking the rules and telling a meaningful story.
We were guided through the discussions by Gabrielle Matthews, a member of the NHS Youth Forum and a medical student at Imperial College School of Medicine, and Maureen Bisognano, President Emerita and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Download the insights from and a summary of the conversation
Watch the conversation below
June 2023 – Listening to patients
In this conversation, Henrietta Hughes, the first appointed Patient Safety Commissioner for England, led the conversation on listening to patients and relatives, and also reflected on the role of social movements.
To close the conversation, the group reflected on the themes and learnings that have emerged during more than two years of Conversations for Kindness.
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Watch the conversation and presentation below
May 2023 – Whose story is it anyhow? Creating safe spaces for patient storytellers
In this conversation, author and patient advocate Sue Robins led the conversation about creating safe spaces for patient storytellers, exploring how sharing stories in the healthcare world helps to make it a kinder place.
She shared her own story of how she started advocating for families after her son was born with Down Syndrome, and more recently, having been diagnosed with breast cancer, how she became a patient storyteller as well.
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Watch the conversation and presentation below
March 2023 – Kindness in the face of conflict
How do clinicians manage to maintain compassion when their clinical, ethical and moral judgement is being contested at the highest level?
Paediatric intensivists from Evelina Children’s Hospital – Miriam Fine Goulden, Marilyn McDougall and Shelley Riphagen – reflected on their professional and personal experiences in this month’s conversation for kindness.
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February 2023 – Regulation in healthcare: exploring if and how this can be done with kindness
Our February conversation covered the role of regulation in healthcare, whether kindness can and should be regulated for, and whether the process of regulation itself can be done with kindness.
We heard from: Victoria O’Brien, a geriatrics registrar on secondment to the Care Quality Commission: Astrid Etherington, who is completing a fellowship with the General Medical Council in Wales; and Nigel Acheson, Regional Medical Officer for the South Region of the NHS England, and previously Deputy Chief Inspector for the Care Quality Commission.
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Watch the conversation and presentations below.
January 2023 – Kindness in Healthcare: Exploring the gap between what we want and what we have in healthcare
More than 80 Kindness in Healthcare community members came together for this conversation about the gap between what we want and what we currently have in healthcare.
They heard from John Ballatt, author of Intelligent Kindness: Reforming the Culture of Healthcare, and consultant paediatrician Dr Kate Pryde, before spending time in groups for the breakout discussion. Paul Batalden, Emeritus Professor at The Dartmouth Institute, also spoke before community members shared their thoughts and reflections.
Download insights from and a summary of the conversation
Watch the conversation and presentations below.
December 2022 – A Christmas Advent calendar: kindness efforts from our community
This meeting had a special format – we heard from ‘kindness experts’ from within our wider community. Eight groups shared a 2-3 minute presentation about how they are focused on returning humanity to the centre of health and care around the world.
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Watch the conversation and presentations below.
November 2022 – Kindness: big and little acts to try
Maureen Bisognano, President Emerita and Senior Fellow, IHI, and Gabby Matthews, Youth Expert Adviser, NHS England, share thought-provoking insights into different acts of kindness we can try.
Watch the conversation below.
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October 2022 – Gathering of Kindness
Cath Crock, Sue Robins and Nicki Macklin discuss their experiences of kindness in healthcare and the work they are doing through Gathering of Kindness events, involving arts and music in health settings, to help spread an environment of kindness in healthcare.
Download insights from and a summary of the conversation
Watch the conversation below.
September 2022
Dr Robin Banerjee and Dr Gillian Sandstrom share their work in understanding what kindness looks like at work – and specifically in healthcare – discuss the benefits and downsides of kindness in the workplace, and highlight the barriers that prevent people from being kinder at work.
Watch the conversation, hosted by Bob Klaber and Suzie Bailey, below.
Download insights from and a summary of the conversation
August 2022
Kindness in Healthcare community members came together to connect and discuss the concept of a movement for care.
Watch the conversation hosted by Suzie Bailey with guest speakers Dr Victor Montori and co-speaker Dr Dominique Allwood, who shared their work on careful and kind patient care and the challenges to this posed by ‘industrialised’ health care.
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July 2022
Watch the presentation from Maureen Bisognano, President Emerita and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, on the concept of Eudaimonia, a new way to think about caring.
Download insights from and a summary of the conversation