31. #WMTY - What Matters To You?

"What matters to you?"

‘What matters to you?’ is a brilliant global movement, whereby healthcare professionals ask patients what matters to them, in terms of personalising healthcare.

It is about listening and hopefully understanding what matters to the patient in the larger context of their life. This will vary greatly between individuals – people’s priorities are different. Their circumstances, their values, their attitudes are unique. What matters toeach of them will all be different.

It is brilliant that this is being increasingly recognised as being important in health care, rather than people just being seen as medical problems to fix, in a 'one size fits all' type approach.

Thursday 9 June was World What matters to you?’ day, so, as my contribution for 2022, I have made this podcast episode exploring this theme, some of my own thoughts and experiences, and bringing in lots of clips of people talking about what this really means to them.

The power of audio - let's listen to the fantastic things people are already sharing, without constantly needing to re-invent the wheel and saying the same (often painful things) over and over again.

I hope you find it thought-provoking and engaging.

Lots of shoutouts to podcast contributors and listeners. We have listeners from all around the world! THANK YOU!! Please leave a review.

Extracts taken from:
Alison Wright - Episode 30 - personalising maternity care
Rachel Jury - Episode 17 - being believed
Fab NHS Stuff - setting up #MatExp #WhoseShoes campaign page - Terri Porrett Episode 12
Pandemic poems - Episode 5

Other links and resources mentioned in the podcast:
#MatExp #WhoseShoes Fab NHS Stuff campaign page
Fab NHS Stuff - 'Wild Card - Whose Shoes' poetry 'event in a tent'  24/11/21
Our  'What Matters to you? presentation  with Florence Wilcock for the RCOG (there will be an updated video after our 2022 @BICSocs presentation )

Shoutouts include: Twitter IDs -  @AliWrightObGyn, @Rocking2Stomas,  @MountfordJames, @FabNHSStuff  @gbpto, @RoyLilley, @FWmaternity, @RCObsGyn, @BICSoc, @PosBirthMidwife, @BeckyMalby, @fhussain73, @Gaynora, @NatMatVoicesorg, @Ldn_Ambulance, @SunitaS2016
... and all the contributors and listeners of the podcast so far!

Find me on Twitter: @WhoseShoes and @WildCardWS.
Dive into https://padlet.com/WhoseShoes/overview and nutshellcomms.co.uk  to find out more about the #WhoseShoes approach to coproduction.

Artwork aided and abetted by Anna Geyer, New Possibilities  www.newpossibilities.co.uk

So,  Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of the NHS, I hope you're enjoying the 'Wild Card Whose Shoes' series. Don't forget,

We LOVE it when you leave a review!
If you enjoy my podcast and find these conversations useful
please share your thoughts by leaving a review (Apple is easiest to leave a review) and comment on your favourite episodes.

I tweet as @WhoseShoes and @WildCardWS and am on Instagram as @WildCardWS.

Please recommend 'Wild Card - Whose Shoes' to others who enjoy hearing passionate people talk about their experiences of improving health care.

Transcript

"What matters to you?"

‘What matters to you?’ is a brilliant global movement, whereby healthcare professionals ask patients what matters to them in terms of personalising healthcare. In the last episode of Wild card - Whose Shoes, I chatted with #FabObs Alison Wright about personalising maternity care - take a listen!

 [Clip from Episode 30 – Alison Wright]

The ‘What matters to you?’ movement is about listening and hopefully understanding what matters to the patient in the larger context of their life. This will vary greatly between individuals – people’s priorities are different. Their circumstances, their values, their attitudes are unique. What matters to them will all be different.

It is brilliant that this is being increasingly recognised as being really important in healthcare, rather than people just being seen as medical problems to fix, in a one size fits all type approach.

So this Thursday 9 June was World What matters to you?’ day. It seems there is a special day for everything these days. I am thinking of having a global Whose Shoes day! What do you think?

I had big plans to do something a bit more sophisticated for this podcast, but I have just been too busy. And the things I have been busy with are important things, things that matter to me - and hopefully some of them are things that make a difference to other people! 

 So then I asked myself what I’m beating myself up for. Sometimes we can try to do much too much and it is important to look after ourselves too.

 Typically, when I am talking with a guest on the wildcard WhoseShoes podcast series, I start by introducing my guest and asking them what matters to them. It is a great question to open the conversation and let the person I am talking to chat about the things that are important to them, whether that’s in their work life or personal life, and then the conversation just flows from there. I’ve never wanted them to be interviews with any pre-set questions, just a way of exploring different topics with people, people who are passionate about making positive change. And of course, it’s always lovely to get feedback on the podcast and to hear what you are enjoying and whether this is working for you. So please remember to put a comment or review the podcast on your favourite platform – again, whatever works for you.

 I am hoping one day to have a bit more time to pick out some common themes and lemon lightbulbs that are emerging through the podcast series – things like people using healthcare services saying how much it matters to them to be listened to, to be trusted, to be seen as the expert in their own body and what is happening. Having their feelings and experiences taken seriously. 

I’d like to pick out themes and then pull out clips from different podcasts, showing the similarities in the so-called little things that really matter to people. I think this will be fascinating – for example an episode on being believed. I remember I used some clips from my podcast episode with Rachel Jury, episode 17’ in this way in a session for NHS England, where James Mountford asked me to join him in getting people to think about what it really means for healthcare professionals to try and walk in people’s shoes.Sgioukd they even be trying to do that?

So here are the clips from Rachel that I used, exploring what it was like not to be believed and how that had such a long-lasting effect on her. I hardly had to say anything else because suddenly people just got it and it was so incredibly powerful:

[Clips from Episode 17 – Rachel Jury)

 So then I thought, actually what I have been busy with for the last couple of weeks, that’s prevented me from doing a more timely podcast, is all around what matters to people. And that was a bit of a lemon lightbulb moment in itself!

 Because then I realised that really it always is with Whose Shoes – What Matters to people runs like a stick of rock through all our work, whether or not there is a new hashtag or a latest buzzword, if you like.

 In fact, it has been fascinating to watch over the last 14 years, since I originally jumped ship from my day job to set up Whose Shoes, different campaigns and key words coming and going. 

And it occurs to me that, particularly as I get older, and a lot of my friends are now retired or retiring, one of the things that matters to me in my work is trying to make the most of what we are already doing, to get people listening to the work we have already done, watching the videos we have already made, indeed listening to the fantastic people who have already contributed to this podcast series, rather than always feeling you have to do something new. 

So, you’ve heard me rave about Fab NHS Stuff before. They are brilliant for this. They have set up a #MatExp #WhoseShoes campaign page for us and they are always adding to it. 

For example, we recently ran a WhoseShoes workshop in Croydon around health inequalities in maternity care, and to try and make the ripples spread a bit wider, I made a little film of the session and posted it on YouTube. Then ping, suddenly the film that we made appeared on the Fab NHS Stuff site this week. 

 And then I remembered that the spark for setting up the campaign page came direct from this podcast. In episode 12, I was talking to Dr Terri Porrett who, together with the Roy Lilley, founded the Fab NHS staff approach and website - and the idea to set up the MatExp WhoseShoes campaign page came up live during our conversation:

 [Clip from Episode 12 - Terri Porrett]

Fab NHS Stuff is just what it says on the tin. They just want to share the good stuff in a very accessible way, and I love them for that. Look out for this year’s Fab Stuff activities which start on the 5th of July, to celebrate the NHS’s 74th birthday! I need to make time to contribute to a video we are putting together for this event! And I’m really proud and privileged to be asked to be part of it. I’m not quite sure what it’s about yet but I know it’s going to be fantastic. #JFDI

 So something I am discovering at the moment, and hopefully which will come through really as part of this podcast, is the power of audio; indeed the power of things like this podcast series, and how I can re-purpose (to use a bit of management speak that I’ve learned recently) clips from existing episodes to bring things alive in a new context, without having to do something totally new or to have to go back to people and ask them to record something new, when they have already done something brilliant. It is already there.

 So, Let’s give you a couple more examples from the work I have been doing recently, which is what’s been keeping me so busy!

 I am doing some truly fascinating work, and work I sometimes find difficult. I find myself asking myself (and I know @MrWhoseShoes asks me all the time) how it came about that I am researching triage in maternity care across the whole of London and running a highly interactive 5-hour online session trying to simulate a board game experience to bring about positive change.

 Amazing times we live in, when you stop to think!
(We did actually run a Whose Shoes workshop online for Professor Becky Malby, from London Southbank University, from a car park in Devon on our way back from holiday recently … but that’s another story!!)

 So what am I talking about? Well, last week we did a big virtual Whose Shoes workshop with the maternity clinical network for maternity in London, working in partnership with maternity voices partnerships and London Ambulance Service. 

 It is really powerful to hear women’s voices direct, it makes an immediacy that doesn’t seem to happen in other ways.

 Interestingly, I’m putting together a ‘What matters to you?’ session for the Royal College of obstetricians and Gynaecologists (the RCOG), with Florence Wilcock. Florence makes exactly the same point:

 [Clip from our RCOG @BicSoc talk]

 To get healthcare professionals to understand why this is important, as you may know we use a lot of poems in Whose shoes. We talked about this in the session we did for Fab NHS Stuff last year – our ‘event in a tent’. I will share links to the various resources I am mentioning in the programme notes for this episode.

 So, coming back to our London maternity triage session, one poem that we use a lot in our maternity work is very relevant here - Who will answer the phone? Indeed, an A3 version of this poem is displayed in the triage area of quite a few maternity units across the country. It reminds busy staff what is important for the women and families they are talking to when, as busy healthcare professionals, they answer the phone…

 [Who will answer the phone? – poem in English]

 What is routine for the healthcare professional, is often a really profound and life changing time in the lives of the people they are dealing with – and what could be more profound or life changing than having a new baby?

 In this triage workshop, we were focusing on trying to simplify systems, to make them clearer to the people using them. In a nutshell, what do you do at different stages of your maternity journey if you are worried about something? 

 It was a fascinating topic to explore, because depending on where you live, how many weeks pregnant you are, what you are worried about and how urgent you and others might perceive it to be, the advice you’ve been given about who to call … and whether anybody actually answers the phone, and whether, if necessary, there is a translator available … it can all get rather complicated. 

 [‘Who should I call?’ - poem]

 And what if you don’t speak English as a first language? These things that are already tricky, can become impossible.

 How do we get people to understand what that might feel like? When people are already finding it difficult to navigate a system.

 As I say, we are working closely with with the Maternity Voices Partnerships.

 There are some amazing people leading these groups across London. We put out a call for people to read the ‘Who will answer the phone?’ poem in their native language, and ended up sharing a version of the poem which brings in women talking in Spanish, in Tamil and in Swahili.

As a bit of a linguist, I think this blended version of the different languages sounds absolutely beautiful – and I hope you do too. But it really got people thinking and understanding in a more profound way:

 [Who will answer the phone? – poem in Spanish, Tamil and Swahili]

 What richness we have in our communities if we open our eyes and our ears. How best to help people, to be interested in what matters to them, to be curious. And that made me think of the conversation I had with Dr Farzana Hussain, right at the beginning of the podcast series, who talked so brilliantly about being curious – and it’s one of my favourite clips from the whole series:

 [Clip from Episode 2 – Dr Farzana Hussain]

 So, be curious, find out what matters to people.

 I guess this has been a bit of a ‘stream of consciousness’ type podcast. I didn’t want to miss out this episode as I thought it was important. So I’ve told you a bit about the things that are keeping me busy. We’ve got two more exciting events happening this coming week.

 I’m really looking forward to our face-to-face Whose Shoes wellbeing event with Gaynor Armstrong and the maternity team in Coventry. We will be reflecting with women and families and staff on how things have been for everyone during the pandemic, and what we can all do to move forward together. 

 It's really exciting. We’ve got a rock choir, virtual reality experience whereby busy healthcare professionals can look after their well-being by having a short time relaxing on the beach. .. we have chiropractors, hand massage and all sorts, … and most importantly, of course, deep conversations understanding some of the sadness and trauma experienced during the pandemic and moving forward together as human beings

 [Building the Future – poem]

 This was one of the poems that we recorded at the height of the pandemic when optimism that things could change and be a bit more flexible, a bit more human in health care, was running high. How does it feel now? Let’s hope we can still achieve that. The podcast I recorded as Episode 5 is a whole series of these pandemic poems, if that interests you.

 We have another innovative virtual WhoseShoes session coming up, working with Sunita Sharma, an obstetrician, a #FabObs, from Chelsea And Westminster hospital, looking at how to improve things for women in postnatal care, and specifically the handover and information sharing between the community midwife, the health visitor and the GP. I love people like Sunita who look outwards and work across services, rather than just thinking in terms of their immediate role and working in silos.

 Sometimes over the years of Whose Shoes, I’ve found that I’ve got the least evidence of some of the biggest stuff I have done, because I have simply been too busy to make that video, too busy to make that Steller story or to write that blog.

 So hopefully the podcast series is filling that gap and providing a lasting record, not least for myself, of some of the things that would otherwise be lost.

 Thank you so much for sharing this journey.