40. Prof. Cath Crock - music in health care - our first international podcast guest!

My 1st international guest - Prof. Cath Crock, founder of  Hush Foundation, Melbourne. Using music to bring kindness into health care.

Cath’s work is 100% in tune 🎹 with  Whose Shoes, bringing creativity and humanity into health care. I met Cath through Bob Klaber’s monthly kindness sessions. Cath and Nicki Macklin from NZ are regular contributors, joining in the early hours!

Social movements for kindness in health care are growing internationally.

The Gathering of Kindness is an amazing line-up of international speakers, demonstrating  how kindness makes a difference. Get involved!

Lemon lightbulbs 🍋💡🍋

•  We can get through these tough times if we’re kind to each other
•  Music makes health services more human!
•  The Hush Foundation in Melbourne sets a wonderful example!
•  If you feel uncomfortable with current practice, be brave to use imagination and creativity to find alternatives
• Culture change can be difficult if people feel you  challenge 'the way we’ve always done things'
• Coproduction is key. Parent-carers notice areas for improvement that staff may not see
• Difficult problems are solved when people come together!
• Bring people with you, not confront them
• Treat people as equals! #NoHierarchyJustPeople
• Listening can improve patient safety
• The big challenge in patient safety is how staff treat each – organisational culture
• If staff don’t feel looked after, they don’t have capacity to go above and beyond or embrace anything new
• People are generous with their time and skills when they feel they’re contributing to something meaningful. The benefit is reciprocal!
• Respect patients’ time - not keep them waiting when they could do something more enjoyable
• Encourage empathy. People feel differently realising these could be their own children
• Plays help us understand patients can get substandard care if teams don’t work robustly together
•  Different art forms – plays, poetry - reach people in a different way to change practice
•  People can recognise themselves and vow to change their practice
•  If you change one person at a time, it’s like a ripple going forwards
•  The pandemic has brought new opportunities
•  It’s hard to be a lone voice for kindness. You become worn down by the system (structural unkindness)
•  We are making strong connections – globally!
•  You need a thick skin to ride the storm when creative, more human approaches come head-to-head with ‘old power’ 😬
• Storytelling helps inspire others – lots shared in this podcast!
• Start your own Gathering of Kindness! - join a ‘watch party’ to help you get started!
• Shoutout to Cath’s wonderful parents. What a legacy! Kindness and music!
• It‘s hard to say ‘no’ to things that bring you joy! 😉

 Links and resources
Hush Foundation
Gathering of Kindness
The Obs Pod: Reading the Signals
Daniel, 15, is an upcoming singer-songwriter - his 1st song 'Day by day' describes Daniel's journey in hospital

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

Chapters

• 0:44 My first international podcast! Coinciding with the launch of the Gathering of Kindness in Australia!
• 2:34 Cath Crock introduces the Hush Foundation in Melbourne - and my music is the way forward
• 3:32 Children undergoing procedures for cancer. How could we do it differently?
• 4:59 Composers came to the hospital to offer their expertise. The especially composed CDs flew off the shelves
• 7:47 Coproduction. Parents notice things, areas for improvement, that staff may not even see. Difficult problems are solved when people come together!
• 9:03 Culture change can be difficult. #NoHierarchyJustPeople
• 9:22 Let’s respect patients’ time - not just keep them waiting for hours when they could do something more enjoyable
• 9:46 Not everyone appreciated bringing in the voices of patients. “You are stirring up families and encouraging them to complain!”
• 10:16 Involving patients in talking to groups of nurse. Bring people with you rather than confront them.
• 11:14 Improving patient safety through listening
• 12:16 The big challenge in patient safety is how staff treat each other – the culture in the organisation
• 12:27 If staff don’t feel looked after, they don’t have the capacity to go above and beyond
• 13:12 Encouraging empathy. People feel differently when they think that these could be their own children
• 13:44 Bringing theatre into hospitals. Famous Australian playwright Alan Hopgood generously helped!
• 15:10 The plays helped people understand that patients can get substandard care if the teams are not working robustly together
• 15:40 Different art forms – plays, poetry etc - can be very effective in reaching people in a different way to change practice
• 17:01 People can recognise themselves and vow to change their practice
• 18:50 If you can just change one person at a time, it is a like a ripple going forwards
• 19:09 Reducing hierarchical fear
• 20:13 15,000 people have given feedback on the plays and come up with constructive action points
• 20:50 The Gathering of Kindness – how it came about
• 22:00 The pandemic has brought some new opportunities
• 22:52 We can’t get through these tough times unless we are kind to each other. Conversations for kindness.
• 25:03 Lockdown! It was tough.
• 25:34 The Gathering of Kindness. What is it?
• 26:48 The Gathering of Kindness event 7-11 November 2022. Get involved!Get juggling!
• 28:41 Structural unkindness. And how to overcome it. And a shoutout to # FabObs Flo and her courageous podcast responding to maternity scandals in the UK
• 29:26 It is hard to be a lone voice for kindness. You become worn down by the system.
• 30:20 Contributors to the Gathering of Kindness. An authors’ panel … and more
• 31:10 Making connections! The fabulous team of music therapists at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London
• 32:55 #MatExp the Musical. When creative, more human approaches come head-to-head with ‘old power’ …
• 35:33 The launch of the next Hush album of music!
• 36:14 People are very generous with their time when they feel they are contrbuting to something meaningful. And the benefit is truly reciprocal.
• 37:40 The launch of the Gathering of Kindness in Canada - Sue Robins
• 37:52 Shoutout to Hexitime, Hexham Abdalla, Marni Panas, Mary Gentile and more …
• 39:52 Connections! Linking Sue Robins and Nicola Enoch – two fabulous champions for people with Down Syndrome
• 41:53 Music – making a difference. Sharing stories and examples.
• 42:56 Young people too! Some lovely stories
• 45:05 A call for others to start their own Gathering of Kindness! Join a watch party to help you get started!
• 46:12 Cath’s wonderful parents. What a legacy. Kindness and music!
• 50:14 It is hard to say ‘no’ when you are passionate about things and they bring you joy!
• 51:05 Out-take! 🐕

Transcript

Gill Phillips  00:10
My name is Gill Phillips and I'm the creator of Whose Shoes a popular approach to coproduction. I was named as an HSJ 100 Wild Card and want to help give a voice to others talking about their ideas and experiences. I'll be chatting with people from all sorts of different perspectives, walking in their shoes. If you are interested in the future of health care, and like to hear what other people think, or perhaps even contribute at some point, Whose Shoes Wild Card is for you.

 Gill Phillips  00:40

So today, I'm very excited. I've got my first international guest on the podcast series, one of our friends from Australia. I'm delighted to welcome Professor Cath Crock, who is the founder of the Hush Foundation in Melbourne. I'll leave Cath to tell you about that. But as you will learn her work is 100% in tune - and you'll have to excuse the pun - with the things that I hold dear in my Whose Shoes approach, bringing creativity and humanity into the mainstream of health care. I met Cath through the fantastic monthly kindness sessions, conversations initiated by Dr. Bob Klaber, who is a previous podcast guest. Kath and also Nicki Macklin from New Zealand, are regular contributors to these conversations, despite having to get up in the middle of the night to join us. I'm really hoping to have Nicki as a podcast guest too one day, #justsaying. It's wonderful that we all take part in this fantastic social movement for kindness in health care, which is growing internationally. As you will hear, I'm fascinated by Cath 's work and looking forward to hearing more about it. Specifically this coming week, the Hush Foundation is hosting the Gathering of Kindness, a week long programme with an amazing line-up of international speakers, sharing examples of how kindness is being used in health care to make a difference across the world. So welcome, Cath. Good morning here. Good evening for you. 

 Cath Crock  02:20
Good evening.  

Gill Phillips  02:23
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself. And however you'd like to start to begin to tell us this amazing story? 

Cath Crock  02:30
Thank you, Gill, it's lovely to be here with you. And yes, it's been so exciting meeting all the international people through the conversations for kindness. And it has really, for me, been heartwarming, because you can sometimes feel a bit like a lone voice. And now I feel like we've got a tribe and we can all share things. And we can help to amplify each other's work. So that's really fantastic. So my day job is I'm a doctor at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. And I've been there now for 28 years. And I started as a young doctor with five young children at home. And I wanted a little bit of part time work. And the job that I was given was to do the bone marrow tests and lumbar punctures on children with leukemia. And I'd have to say, Gill, it was a life-changing experience to launch into this job and to be doing procedures on children who were the same age as my own children.  

Gill Phillips  03:31
Wow. 

 Cath Crock  03:32
Yet we were holding them down in a sound-proof treatment room to do these procedures. And the pain management to me just didn't seem to be adequate. And I found it pretty distressing times. So I did something a little bit unusual that I didn't realise, I sat down with a group of families who were going through this journey and I said, "How could we help you to improve the journey? When your child's got cancer or another life threatening illness? What are some of the touch points, the places where you think that it could be done differently, and we could learn from you?". And I'd have to say the families were generous in their praise and their gratitude for all the good care that they were getting. But once we'd asked them, they also knew that there were things that could be improved. And once they told us then we could do something about it. So I set about trying to make some of the changes that they suggested. And one of the first things they talked about was the environment, coming into a hospital. It's so challenging and difficult, you feel vulnerable and quite out of place. And there's all this medical jargon and there's noisy equipment. They asked whether we might be able to bring music into that environment and help to reduce stress. 

 Gill Phillips  04:57
Fantastic. Wow. 

Cath Crock  04:59
I come from a family where we had music at home the whole time. And in fact, I then realised, you come into hospital either as a patient, or as somebody working there, and there is no music. It's it's quite a different environment. My children were learning from professional musicians at the time. So I thought, well hey, tap into their expertise. So I invited some of these composers to come into the hospital into the operating theatres and the waiting rooms, and some of the clinics and to just stand in the corner and listen, and observe what was going on and have a listen to that sound environment. So what the composers were able to say was, this is extremely challenging as a sound environment, there's a cacophony of noise. And if you're not very careful, even if you bring music in there, it could actually make it worse and raise people's anxiety. And they said they had ideas about how they could do this really carefully and gently. This was the start of the Hush Foundation that you mentioned at the beginning. And I had musicians and composers donating their time to come and help. I had sound recordists, graphic designers, all sorts of people who said, "We love this concept, we'd like to help that". So I made one CD of this music that had been composed for the operating theatre, and I started playing it. And people kept coming past the door and saying, "Wow, this is amazing. Can you burn us a copy of this?, back in the day when we burnt CDs, and I burned about 50 CDs at home and handed them out and other people were using them. And I thought this might have some sort of legs in more than just my operating theatre. So we packaged the first CD up. And we went and spoke to the people at the post office. And we said, "Would you be able to sell some of these to raise some money so we could do more music in hospitals?" And in the first year, they just walked out of the post offices, and we had enough money then to make the next CD and to keep on producing music. And it's sort of rolled on from there. It's been quite amazing. 

Gill Phillips  07:23
It is amazing. It's really amazing. And that's what I love about these podcasts because I only know a tiny bit of that, and enough to be really intrigued. But I didn't know ... I knew you make music specially. And I thought, why are you doing that? And the way you explained it there with the cacophony of noise and getting experts who really understand that. But it's just so moving Cath and so important what you're doing,

 Cath Crock  07:47
The composers could stand in the room and tell me what note the anaesthetic machine was making. And it's really quite extraordinary, because they're so finely tuned to those sorts of things. That is their expertise. And I think one of the things I love doing is bringing people of all different expertise to put their heads around some difficult problems. So that was the first thing, the music, then the parents also talked about quite a lot of patient safety issues that they noticed things that we didn't even realise - about medication errors, or about hygiene in various parts of the hospital. They talked about how the rubbish bins in the cancer ward were emptied at midnight, when their children had just got off to sleep after a really big day. And suddenly someone would come in and bang around and and empty the rubbish bins. How does a hospital system know this unless you tap in to the people who are living the experience?

Gill Phillips  08:52
Yeah, exactly.  

Gill Phillips  08:54
It was extraordinary what I learned ... but 

Gill Phillips  08:58
 But 

Cath Crock  08:58
There was a downside, Gill 

Gill Phillips  09:01
What was that?  

Cath Crock  09:03
I came up against a medical and nursing hierarchy that were really threatened by having the voice of the patients and the families at the table. 

Gill Phillips  09:14
Now what made me surprised you were going to say that? 

Cath Crock  09:17
Well, I didn't expect it at the time.  

Gill Phillips  09:20
Really?  

Cath Crock  09:22
No, I didn't didn't even see coming. I thought this is fantastic. I started telling them all these things that I'd learned that the oncology patients would wait six hours when they came to clinic. And why couldn't we give them a pager so they could go and do something else respectful with their time and come back when we needed them. They had to sit in a plastic chair for hours and wait. So I thought everyone would be really pleased to find this out but they weren't it some people were really supportive but others said you are stirring up the families and making them complain.

 Gill Phillips  09:58
As opposed to listening to the families?

Cath Crock  10:01
Yeah, they said, "we've done it the same way for 20 years. And we don't like change"

 Gill Phillips  10:06
They said that in words? 

Cath Crock  10:09
In words. 

Gill Phillips  10:12
Wow. Which fired you up all the more? 

Cath Crock  10:16
In a way it did, although I'd have to say, I'm very shy, and I wasn't into speaking up. So I tried to do it gently. I tried to do it with music and gentle conversations and bringing patients to speak with me to talk to groups of nurses - bring a parent with me, for them to tell their story. And some of those ways were more effective than taking it head on, I think. 

Gill Phillips  10:46
Yeah, yeah. And always are, I think, really.  

Cath Crock  10:50
Yes.  

Gill Phillips  10:51
Bring people with you, isn't it rather than confront them? 

Cath Crock  10:54
Well, that's right.  

Gill Phillips  10:56
And that's leads to the kindness conversations, doesn't it really, to try and get on the same page with people and bring people together? 

 Cath Crock  11:03
I think that's what you need to do. And so maybe the change was slower than it could have been if I'd pushed a bit harder. But I also thought I needed to be a bit strategic about this, because I could just see what the patients and families were bringing to the table that was so critical to improving healthcare experiences. So in 2010, I was fortunate to get a Churchill fellowship. And I framed the fellowship around patient-centered care and patient safety. Because I thought one way to really convince some of my medical and nursing colleagues who were somewhat resistant, was to link it closely to how safe patients' care would be if we were able to listen and use their feedback to help us improve. Yeah, so I travelled to the US and the UK, went to so many interesting patient safety experts. And, in fact, this was quite a life-changing trip for me, Gill, because I suddenly realised why patient-centered care was so difficult to do. 

 Gill Phillips  12:15
Right. 

Cath Crock  12:16
 And what the patient safety experts were saying was, the big challenge, actually, in patient safety is how staff treat each other, and what the culture is between staff. And that staff who don't feel that they are being looked after by their colleagues, looked after by their organisation, in fact, don't have the capacity to go above and beyond. And I was going to them saying, and now we want you to do patient-centered care, on top of everything else, I could tell that staff were really checking out and were not going to follow this conversation. 

Gill Phillips  12:53
That's so important. And I think in terms of what I'm trying to do with the podcast series, you know, I'm trying to collect these 'lemon light bulbs', we're calling them. And that's just jumping out as one   - that word 'capacity' and 'overwhelm', 

 Cath Crock  13:07
Yeah

 Gill Phillips  13:07
And people feeling a bit threatened by something new. But to understand that, you know, everybody takes a step back, and they've probably got their own children at home. And would you want that to be the way it is, and it suddenly obvious, isn't it? But if you're used to doing things a certain way for 20 years, it's definitely threatening to have anything big coming along. Challenging that and perhaps you've been doing it wrong all those years, you know?

 Cath Crock  13:28
Yes, I think it was a very complex scenario, but certainly, that you don't have that capacity to do any more or any better. Because you're not feeling great in your own workplace. 

Gill Phillips  13:42
Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  13:44
So one of the other things that I then started when I came home from that trip was to bring theatre into hospitals. So I worked with a playwright and I fed this playwright Alan Hopgood, who's a very famous Australian playwright. I fed him true stories from patients and families and healthcare staff. And he was a little bit surprised at first, he was a generation who believed that you go into hospital and everything goes well, and you come out again, and everything's fine. And for me to be portraying medication errors and staff being bullied and not feeling safe to speak up and patients to being dismissed. He found that a little bit of a challenge, but we've ended up writing three plays that have been on tour since 2015. In hospitals in Australia, in the US and in New Zealand.  

Gill Phillips  14:41
Fantastic. 

Cath Crock  14:42
Yeah. And we put the play on in the hospital cafeteria or the seminar room, whatever space is available, and it blows the staff away Gill.  

 Gill Phillips  14:54
Yeah, I can believe it

 Cath Crock  14:56
To have these scenarios acted out. It's way different to having a PowerPoint presentation on patient safety and medication errors, to see an unfolding disaster in the first play. And once the plays have been put on, they take about 30 minutes. And then we have a discussion with the audience. And every single audience we've been to, picks up on the fact that there's bad behaviour going on behind the scenes, there's a lack of respect and kindness between staff and that the patients and families slipped through the cracks and really can get substandard care if the teams are not working robustly together.

Gill Phillips  15:40
We've actually had an example - some of the work that we've done with Whose Shoes in Ireland - and we normally in our work have a graphic artist recording the the conversations as they happen. So that's really powerful. And Anna and I, the graphic artist, have been over to Galway in Ireland, and to Limerick. So we've been twice and Limerick were wanting to run another session. And they actually worked to put a play together to do the same kind of thing. It was around perinatal mental health. Now I think that got stopped with the pandemic, and I'm not quite sure what happened to it. And we use - I guess, in terms of different art forms, and what you were saying about how people respond so differently - we've used poems all the way through Whose Shoes and again, that just touches a point that other kind of more traditional methods don't seem to go there quite the same.

 Cath Crock  16:35
I think you're right, Gill, I think it taps into a different part of your brain. And it really frees you up to be able to think a little bit differently.

 Gill Phillips  16:44
Yeah, which is exciting. And you can see things sparking in people's eyes, and they get it and they get it in a different way. And then they start to own it and, and want to make change, and then they'll feel part of it. And that's exciting rather than threatening, hopefully.

 Cath Crock  17:01
it's very exciting. We've seen some interesting responses to the plays, where in one of the plays, we have an older consultant who's somewhat dismissive of the junior staff if they don't get everything, right, and he tends to bully them and intimidate them. And we've had people in the audience stand up and say, Oh, my goodness, I've seen myself in that person. Yeah. And I don't want to be like that anymore. It's really quite dramatic.

 Gill Phillips  17:31
And that's brave to say. I remember one Whose Shoes workshop we had. And normally, you know, it's very, 'no hierarchy, just people'. And we don't have people in uniform, they don't introduce themselves around the table. It's really trying to create conditions for people to be equal. And I spotted one table, and this woman was very dominant, and had an opinion on everything and was clearly kind of senior in the hospital. And when we came to do the pledges, at the end, I say, "Is there anyone who's so fired up about what they're going to do that they want to share it with everybody?". And sure enough, this woman put her hand up first. And I thought, oh, here we go. Because it's so nice to meet someone who, who wouldn't normally do that, who genuinely are really fired up to tell people. And then - and this is why it stuck with me as these things do - it was a really kind of humble moment. And she was almost in tears, as it went on. Saying, "I've realised the power of just listening to people, and hearing with more junior people around me, telling me things that normally I just would not hear". And I thought a) for her to have that light bulb moment that she didn't need to tell us about was pretty extraordinary. But the courage, and it was within her own hospital, to say that up front, I thought, that's making change. 

Cath Crock  18:50
That is extraordinary, because I feel like if you can just change one person at a time, it's like a ripple that goes forward. 

Gill Phillips  18:59
It really is. Yeah. And I think some of these outcomes are hard, you know, you can't measure them as such, because she might well have not said that. But the the effect is still there. 

Cath Crock  19:09
Exactly. So we had one play performance where, after it finished, one of the junior doctors stood up and said, "Look, we don't feel safe when we ring the cardiology consultants at night". And the other junior doctors agreed with her. The chief executive was in the room and said, "Well, I think from now on we'll be recording all the overnight phone calls for education and training purposes". 

 Gill Phillips  19:35
Wow. Extraordinary.

 Cath Crock  19:36
And immediate impact. Extraordinary and really fantastic. And something that other people have then gone on to do as well. Not in a punitive way, but in a way that a consultant who's woken up at two in the morning, will check their language and just think about the person on the other end of the phone.

 Gill Phillips  19:55
That's a big one, isn't it? That whole thing about being woken up in the night and expectations and language and yeah, good for you.

 Cath Crock  20:04
Yes, I still remember ringing a cardiology consultant at two o'clock in the morning in 1982.

 Gill Phillips  20:12
That's obviously stuck with you!!

 Cath Crock  20:14
It sticks with you. It really does, because you only make that call once and the next time you try and get someone else to do it. So Gill, out of the plays, I started to get pretty concerned about this feedback. So something like 15,000 people have now given us the feedback that we've collated 

 Gill Phillips  20:36
15,000?!

 Cath Crock  20:38
15,000 that we've reported back to their hospital, what their staff are saying, and we asked the staff, "What are two things that you think your organization could do differently as a result of the issues you've seen in the play? And what are two things that you as an individual could do differently?" So you're breaking it into those two bits, and we give that feedback to the hospital. Now, it was overwhelmingly negative about the culture and behaviors that go on in every single organization that we visited. And that was really where the idea for the Gathering of Kindness came about. I thought the negativity is overwhelming. But let's just park that and try to be more aspirational. And to think about what's a kind health system, one where you feel kindly treated by your colleagues and your organisation. And then the patients and families are going to feel the kindness as well. So in 2015, we got 100 people together for two days. And they came from every walk of life. And we were in this beautiful tent out in the bush. And we all talked about these issues, about what what it could be like if we did health care differently. And from there, really, this movement has grown and well until we got to 2020 - in the pandemic. We used to go on a road show each year, taking the plays, and the music, storytellers writers, and doing narrative workshops, etc. In different hospitals, the pandemic brought it all to a grinding halt. So we haven't done a play performance since because we couldn't take actors into the hospitals. But instead, we went online. And in fact, we've had nearly 40,000 people watching our Gathering of Kindness online sessions over the last couple of years. So in a way, the pandemic amplified the issues because as you'd feel too Gill, kindness is even more important than we'd ever realized. We aren't get through such tough times if we're not kind to each other.

 Gill Phillips  22:57
So the pandemic sometimes brings opportunities, doesn't it? And there's one. And I think the whole issue about, we're finding this and I'm sure so many organizations are, the difference in terms of an opportunity of doing things face to face, which is wonderful. Online is more difficult. It's not so vibrant, in terms of human beings actually coming together. But to be able to bring in more people and do things a bit differently. It has brought different opportunities.

 Cath Crock  23:24
It really has. So not all bad. And I think also a very good time for us to have a bit of a rethink and a reset about the way we do many things in health care.

 Gill Phillips  23:39
 Yeah. And I mean, just us coming together. I think these things have been accelerated through the pandemic, haven't they? Tell us about how the conversations for kindness fit in to that? Where did they come in? Because you've obviously done this work so long ago. And it was such a natural development, I guess, to link with Bob Klaber and those conversations.

 Cath Crock  24:01
Yes, I think it must have been somewhere on social media that I saw it and got involved fairly early on. I think they'd had a couple of meetings, one or two meetings before I joined. And they have been so welcoming. It's been absolutely fantastic. Particularly for me and Nicki, we're a long way away from everybody else. And the time of day is always almost impossible.

 Gill Phillips  24:26
Crazy!

 Cath Crock  24:27
But it is such a welcoming group, and a group that loves to share all the good things that we're doing and then help us to do more.

 Gill Phillips  24:37
And we'd really miss you if you weren't there. I always look out for Nicki and Cath. It's normally about what, four or five in the morning? It's about as bad as it gets isn't it?

Cath Crock  24:49
it's usually three o'clock, and at the moment we've just gone into summertime so it's 4am but it's very difficult then to go back to sleep because you are absolutely buzzing and excited. And I think it really helped to get me through the pandemic times, which were really hard. I don't know if you know, but Melbourne had probably the longest  lockdowns of anywhere. We had something like 263 days in a row, where we were not allowed to travel more than five kilometers. And it was really hard times.  But I would still feel like getting up at three in the morning to talk about kindness.

 Gill Phillips  25:34
So the Gathering of Kindness, because we haven't got that have we, in the UK? But you've got that very well established. And you're also launching in Canada with Sue Robins, I learnt the other night, which is amazing.

Cath Crock  25:46
Exactly. So we've been doing most of the events out of Melbourne, and then started to gather an international audience during the pandemic. And also a very dear friend, Lorraine Dickey has done three Gathering of Kindness events in the United States, just outside of Philadelphia, , and I was lucky enough to travel to two of them, which was just so mind boggling to see this event running with American actors and, you know, American speakers, etc. But taking on their own flavour. And what I'm hoping for the Gathering of Kindness is it will get its own momentum. And people will run their own events, however they like to I don't feel any ownership over how it's done. It's really such a good opportunity to have different conversations and do them creatively.

 Gill Phillips  26:40
So tell us about what you're doing in Australia then or what's coming up? Because it's going to be this coming week, as we post this podcast? What are you up to, Cath?

 Cath Crock  26:48
Well, we've bitten off quite a lot. This time, we decided to have a hybrid event because people really were talking about needing to connect person to person. So we've called it Connections. And it will be two days of live events in Melbourne, where we've got a huge array of people, we've got a cardiologist and a professor of music who are talking together about the physiology of stress and how music can help with that. We've got an incredible juggler, a man who talks about different perspectives, and he uses juggling as his metaphor. So I think we're all going to be learning how to juggle and how to reduce stress in our lives.

Gill Phillips  27:33
I'm really interested in that, obviously, the different perspectives and the juggling. Yeah.

 Cath Crock  27:38
It'll be very interesting. 

Gill Phillips  27:39
You can even have like Whose Shoes coloured balls, because we've got the four colours, I've just got that going around in my head at the moment the juggling 

 Cath Crock  27:49
That's possible, he's going to bring juggling balls for everyone who comes. So they will go away with their own set to keep practising with

Gill Phillips  27:57
Really?

 Cath Crock  27:58
Yeah. We've got a think tank with some leaders from different parts of health care. And the think tank is based on an article from our Medical Journal of Australia just recently, on structural unkindness, talking about how it's all very well for each and every individual to be working on kindness. But if you're in a structurally unkind system, that can be extremely difficult. So we're going to reflect on that with the whole room, which we think will be around 300 people and do like a World Cafe.

 Gill Phillips  28:38
That's fascinating that concept.

Cath Crock  28:41
Yes. I think that will be a very interesting one. What are some of the structural unkindnesses that we might be able to do something about?

 Gill Phillips  28:51
Yeah, I'm really taken with that. In fact, very relevant. I think my good friend Florence Wilcock was talking about that on her podcast, 'the ObsPod' this week. She recorded an episode called 'Reading the signals', talking about the maternity scandals that we've sadly had in the UK recently, and how hard it is for individuals to remain compassionate when the organisational culture is simply just not supporting your efforts or even working actively against you. 

 Cath Crock  29:24
Yes, exactly. 

 Gill Phillips  29:26
Because, you know, you can have someone as kind as you like, and then at what point do you become a mug or, you know, if, the whole culture around you, when you go to work, and the way that you're treated or as a patient ...  It's quite a crusade, isn't it to carry on and come through and bring that kindness into an organisation? Unless you've got allies and champions and people lifting you up as well? 

 Cath Crock  29:51
Yeah.  And I think you can get worn down by the system if it's just relentlessly difficult. You know, if payroll is relentlessly difficult and rostering and some of those structural things just make it a trudge to get through your day.

 Gill Phillips  30:08

Yeah. I just love what you're doing Cath. It's just amazing. And you've got all these different contributors, I can feel it sort of growing and how excited people must be to be part of that,

 Cath Crock  30:20
I think so. We've also got an author's panel. So we've got people who've written relevant books, one who's written - one of our ABC radio announcers - has written a book called "Whole notes" and one of her chapters was on kindness and music. So she's going to facilitate talking to some other authors who, a couple of them, young doctors who've had a fairly tough time in their journey. And one wrote that as a novel, one wrote it as non-fiction, and we've got  a GP, who really got burnt out by the system, and has now learned different ways to look after himself through Narrative Medicine. So writing his own story, but also running narrative workshops.

 Gill Phillips  31:08
So exciting. There is so much! I knew I'd be like touching an iceberg today. That, you know, I know a tiny bit of this story. And already my head's going crazy with connections that I want to make. And have I mentioned the incredible team of music therapists at Chelsea and Westminster hospital, or do you know them?

 Cath Crock  31:31

I think I have met some of them because I went to Chelsea and Westminster in 2018. 

 Gill Phillips  31:38
Okay, brilliant. 

 Cath Crock  31:39
Yeah. And I had a tour all around. And I think I met some of the music therapists, it was quite an amazing sound system that they had into some of the treatment rooms, actually way ahead of what we've got at our hospital.

 Gill Phillips  31:53
Really? So obviously, there's scope to compare and learn from each other. And I know that they were doing work around children's services, but then maternity and neonatal and you know, I just absolutely love what they do. And Claire Flower, who's my main contact and friend there, is now a consultant ... is wider than music therapy now. She was a music therapist, and now ... like those therapies, that kind of wider role, so that would bring in in I'm sure storytelling and music and all these different approaches. And it's just so so lovely. And so obvious, really. I love music, in everything I do, and you've got different moods, and you've got different ... it's so individual, isn't it? So you can imagine the idea when you said earlier that if it was done wrong, it could be making a situation worse. It's just so personal, isn't it? What works for you. And to  tap into that.

Cath Crock  31:53
Exactly. Well, you should introduce me to her and we can exchange music.

 Gill Phillips  32:49
Yeah, absolutely. And again, Claire, I'm sure at some point, will talk on the podcast. She was the person ... Okay, so I'll tell you a little tiny story from me. We got the amazing opportunity to bring Whose Shoes to the main stage of NHS Expo, which is pretty much the biggest conference. And I won't go into the story of how it happened because it really wasn't a kind of like A to B linear journey. And I think by the time we actually presented '#MatExp the Musical' on the main stage at Expo as the penultimate session, there were some questions being asked as to how this sort of slightly radical approach had happened. And we told the story of 'Better Births' ... a very serious topic, very serious approach. It took months of planning. Crowdsourced. We had, I think 35 people involved, with our #MatExp, maternity experience sashes, colour coded in Whose Shoes - the red, blue, yellow, green, representing their actual roles. So the obstetricians, the frontline staff, GPs - yellow sashes; the creatives, the mavericks, like the music therapists and ourselves - green sashes. We had formal leaders, they're like national leaders - red sashes. That was the power that you need to influence if you want to make change. And then blue, the people themselves using services, including some bereaved parents; it was very, very powerful. And we used Whose Shoes scenarios and poems to tell the story. Well, the reason I'm telling you that is it was '#MatExp the Musical', and Claire Flower was our music therapist, bringing a piano along that we'd crowdsourced in Manchester from Forsyth music shop. As a bit of reciprocity: we will get you on the main stage at EXPO with your logo on the back of the piano, if you provide us with a piano that we don't particularly want to pay for ... It was one of those. 

 Cath Crock  34:55
Yes, I know all about that!

Gill Phillips  34:57
All of that ... I can feel that you KNOW what I'm talking about, all that reciprocity. And it was Claire and her colleague, Grace Meadow, who came together and sang for us. And they brought their travel guitar on the train because we weren't allowed to move the grand piano in the hotel where we had our rehearsal in the morning. It was totally one of those. And it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done. And the most rewarding.

 Cath Crock  35:26
Yes, amazing. 

 Gill Phillips  35:28
Music just touches people differently, doesn't it?

 Cath Crock  35:31
Absolutely does. So Gill, at this Gathering of Kindness, we're also launching our next Hush album of music. 

 Gill Phillips  35:39
Fantastic!

Cath Crock  35:40
Which is solo guitar by an extraordinary guitarist, Slava Gregorian, and Slava came to me at the end of 2020. And he said, Look, I'm in lockdown in this pandemic. And I would love to compose something for Hush, but what I want to do is write notes of gratitude to health practitioners, for all the hard work that they're going through. So he's called this album 'Gratitudes'. And he's going to launch it on the Monday night of the Gathering of Kindness.

 Gill Phillips  36:10
That's amazing, 

 Cath Crock  36:11
Which will be pretty special. 

Gill Phillips  36:13
 It will, yeah. 

 Cath Crock  36:14
So we'll hear him give a concert that night.

 Gill Phillips  36:17
And I think what I'm hearing as well, is that if people to have something that they can actually DO - people are generous, aren't they? 

 Cath Crock  36:25

They're very generous.
 Gill Phillips  36:26

Yeah, to be able to contribute that for something that really matters. I'm sure he's getting a lot out of that as well. It's fantastic.

 Cath Crock  36:33
Look, two composers and musicians have said to me that it really has been life changing for them to compose music with such a purpose that they know is not just for a Concert Hall Stage, but it's for people who are in great need, and who can be comforted by the music. So I think this is a two-way thing. You know, the generosity is going going both ways.

 Gill Phillips  36:59
And I think ultimately, we all know that ...it's so fragile. Tomorrow, it could be us. It could be our family. You know, it's so human, isn't it in terms of people realising that we're lucky, hopefully to be healthy and not in hospital? And if you are, that's exactly what you want for yourself and for your family.

 Cath Crock  37:20
Absolutely. Right. Yes.

 Cath Crock  37:22
So ...

 Cath Crock  37:24
Well, do you want to hear some more that's happening. So we've got these in person events, which are all going to be streamed and recorded anyway, so people can get to see them wherever they are. And then on the Wednesday, we've got the launch of the Gathering of Kindness, Canada. So Sue Robins has done some amazing interviews, that will be going out on that Wednesday, and then she'll do a Q&A with the online audience. And later in the week, we've got a couple of other fantastic online speakers. So we've got Hesham Abdualla, who's from our Conversations for Kindness, talking about Hexitime

 Cath Crock  38:03
We know Hesham !

 Cath Crock  38:04
Yep, Hesham's done an awesome interview about Hexitime and explaining that. And really, that has an international appeal.

 Gill Phillips  38:12
It's a fantastic concept, isn't it? Just so simple! 

 Cath Crock  38:16
Yes. 

 Gill Phillips  38:17
And anyone can get involved and use their expertise and get something back with somebody who can help them. Fantastic.

 Cath Crock  38:25
Yes, it's a great concept. We've got Marni Panas, who also comes out of Canada but Marni and I spoke at a conference in Melbourne, some 10 years ago, I think, and we came friends out of that, and Marni is going to be talking about unconscious bias. So that's really interesting session. And then we've got Mary Gentile from the U.S who talks about giving voice to values. Now, her programmes haven't really run in health care before, but we can just ... even from the the name of her topic, you can understand that being true to your values, wherever you're working, is absolutely critical to being joyful in your work and to doing the best work that you can do.

 Gill Phillips  39:15
What a programme you've put together!

 Cath Crock  39:17
 An amazing programme. We're all exhausted, I hope we can get to the 7th of November without falling to pieces. But so far, the generosity and the enthusiasm of all the people who are involved is just amazing. So I'd really love people to come online and join us and listen to these sessions. So they'll be actually available over 12 months.

Gill Phillips  39:40
So, if this goes out the day before your festival starts, we can put in the programme notes and about how they can get involved with a link and so on. 

Cath Crock  39:49
Yeah, that would be great.

 Gill Phillips  39:51
It's interesting. You mentioned Sue Robins then. I didn't know Sue at all until our Conversation for Kindness this week. And she was talking, wasn't she, about the launch of the Gathering of Kindness in Canada and how amazing that is. But what I love is the connections that are made so obviously me linking with Sue and seeing what a great friend of yours and the story behind that was lovely. But then hearing Sue talk so powerfully about her own story and her son with Down Syndrome. Well, since then I've linked with Sue and I've linked with her on Twitter. And I've introduced her to one of my big pals Nicola Enoch, who's founded the Positive about Down Syndrome community in the UK, which has been amazing, sent Sue a copy of Nicola's TED Talk that she's done. And those two are now linking with each other. So it's just a tiny example, isn't it of the ripples that are happening? But that's, that's just this week.

 Cath Crock  40:50
It is very exciting these ripples, because I saw that you'd linked her with that beautiful lady. And so I've joined with her on Twitter as well.

 Gill Phillips  41:00
Have you? And now I'll introduce you definitely to Claire. And that whole community because Claire isn't just one person, Claire obviously opens the door to a whole gang of people that you'll enjoy. I do some crazy things for Advent, sometimes, well, kind of most most years ... I'm really trying to resist this year. It's just crazy. How we get drawn into these things. And

Cath Crock  41:30
With so many ideas.

 Gill Phillips  41:31
ith so many ideas and Claire's contributed to that and brought in some of her music therapists playing for us on the Advent series and trying to make it just fun for people. And it's just so lovely to tap into these different communities and see what's possible. 

 Cath Crock  41:50
Yeah, I think you learn from everyone that you tap into. And yeah, then the connections just go further and further.

 Gill Phillips  41:57
With our maternity experience work, there was a lovely story. And you'll really love this, Cath. Someone who came along to the antenatal clinic in Chelsea and Westminster, and was feeling anxious, and heard Claire playing her, I think it was the piano, and came up to her afterwards and said, "Actually, I used to be ... and I need to dust it down. I need to practice but ... a violinist. Could I come along and play with you?" And I think she hadn't played the violin for years, but was obviously very good. And then we've got a little video of them playing together. And you can see, in formal terms, the patient and the member of staff, but you know, the barriers are gone. And they're just two people making music together and making people smile.

Cath Crock  42:44
And changes the whole experience. That's fantastic.

 Gill Phillips  42:48
And playing in the waiting room for other people. And, if people hear that story is well, it's even more lovely, really.

 Cath Crock  42:56
Well, we had a 15 year old boy with leukemia. And he was there the day that one of the composers came in, and they started to chat. And the boy plays a saxophone in the school band. And next thing, the whole scary experience of coming for a bone marrow was totally changed by his conversation with the composer. And then getting tickets to a concert you know, on it went, on it goes and it changed this boy, it was really fantastic.

 Gill Phillips  43:27
And I'm now thinking of someone else, someone I follow on Twitter. Balsam, her name is, the mum who's a healthcare professional and her son Daniel is that age, and has had a really difficult healthcare experience. A highly talented young sportsman becoming suddenly disabled and becoming a wheelchair user and producing incredible songs and music, which are helping him process it all and move on with his life. And it's really lovely to see the Twitter community coming together to support and help him. So a big shoutout to Daniel and his mum. 

 Cath Crock  44:04
Yes

 Gill Phillips  44:05
Bringing people together. It's lovely and across age groups, isn't it?

 Cath Crock  44:08
Exactly. It's very special. One of the composers wrote a song particularly for this little girl called Sophie who had leukemia. And he wrote the song and called it 'The stars above us all', because he could see what absolute stars these children were with all the things that they had to go through and how they bravely just managed to take it in their stride.

 Gill Phillips  44:32
And the difference that must have made to that little girl and to her family. It's just incredible, isn't it? Written for her. Beautiful!

 Cath Crock  44:39
Yes, she's now had a piece written for her. And when we premiered it, he actually paid for her air ticket to come to the concert because she lived in the country. 

 Gill Phillips  44:50
Oh my goodness, yeah. 

 Cath Crock  44:52
And he said Sophie's got to be here when this is played the first time.

 Gill Phillips  44:56
 Of course. Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  44:57

So it was extraordinary.

 Gill Phillips  44:59
Fantastic! So, what else do we need to talk about? Cath, I love this conversation.

 Cath Crock  45:05
Just one more thing would be that I would love people to start their own events, to have a look at our website to grab some of the content. Some of the hospitals that have joined with us this year, are going to have 'watch parties'. So they'll be showing it online, but they'll have a group of staff together who can watch one of the sessions and then talk about it amongst themselves and hopefully, learn something together.

 Gill Phillips  45:32
So that would be a really easy way into it, would it  - to challenge someone to ...

 Cath Crock  45:37
Very easy start

 Gill Phillips  45:37
Yeah. What would be  ... perhaps you could help with that, you know, one or two sessions that if people signed up for that session, and could set up a watch party around it, would that be perhaps a way of sparking it, say in the UK or ...?

 Cath Crock  45:39
Absolutely. So after the other night's Conversation for Kindness, we've had a couple of inquiries about what can we do in the UK? So let's make it happen!

 Gill Phillips  46:00
Yeah, I could feel that just sparking off. It wasn't gonna stay silent, was it?

 Cath Crock  46:04
No. Well, Gill, I was born in Oxford. So I'm ... English really? 

 Gill Phillips  46:10
Right. Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  46:12
My dad did his orthopedic training in Oxford. And I was born when he was doing that. So

 Gill Phillips  46:17
So, tell us the story. I'm glad you've mentioned your dad, because that came up on the Conversation for Kindness the other night, I love the story you told about your dad, and really what's probably brought you into the work that you do. You've grown up with this kind of concept of kindness and inclusion.

 Cath Crock  46:36
Yes, for my dad, in fact, and his identical twin ...

 Gill Phillips  46:39
So, I didn't know about the identical twin. 

 Cath Crock  46:43
Dad was an orthopedic surgeon. And his identical twin was an eye surgeon, the first professor of ophthalmology in Australia. And they both trained in the UK. But they both were the most kind gentlemen that you would ever meet. And as a small child, I would go on dad's ward round on a Saturday and Sunday morning. And he would come home with arms full of vegetables from families, he talked with such gentleness and kindness to all the nursing staff that everybody just loved being on his ward rounds. And our family home would have the carpenter from the hospital or a really famous professor from somewhere overseas. We never knew the difference. Everybody was interesting and amazing to my dad. And he just brought the best out in people. And in fact, when he was retiring, they had a celebration at the hospital. And one of the younger people stood up and said, "Under Harry Crock, it was like we were a field of tall poppies, we all felt as important as each other in the department". Now, for that to be coming about a leader of an orthopedic department is probably quite unusual.

 Gill Phillips  48:05
I'm sure it is. And what a lovely, lovely thing to take away.

Cath Crock  48:09
Absolutely. Everybody felt special and valued in that department. And so of course, Dad got the best out of his team. 

 Gill Phillips  48:14
Of course he did. Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  48:15
Yeah. And I've always loved seeing how he worked. And I spent quite a bit of time assisting him in operations when I was a medical student, and just seeing how well it could be done. And I think that's carried with me always, that you can treat people with kindness and respect and gentleness, and you actually get the best out of the situation.

 Gill Phillips  48:40
For what a beautiful experience as a child and how that's influenced and shaped your life and your work. Really lovely. 

 Cath Crock  48:49
Yes. And the music side comes from my mother.

 Gill Phillips  48:53
Oh, does it? 

 Cath Crock  48:53
Yeah, who was also a doctor and had five children. But in her day, it was quite difficult to have your own practice, of course, so she was dad's surgical assistant, but she was also the one who brought music into the house. And so mum wanted all of us to learn music. And that's been a really important thing there for me too. 

 Gill Phillips  49:18
Thta's beautiful, it  really is. Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  49:20
And mum at 92, Mum at 92 is still dancing tango.

 Gill Phillips  49:25
 Is she? 

 Cath Crock  49:26
Yes, yes.

 Gill Phillips  49:28
We'll have her on Strictly. 

 Cath Crock  49:30
Absolutely. 

 Gill Phillips  49:31
That's raging in the UK at the moment, Strictly Come Dancing. Yeah. 

 Cath Crock  49:35
Oh, well, Mum's in the advanced class. She was an Australian Irish dance champion as a child. So

 Gill Phillips  49:42
Incredible! You've got a very interesting family.

 Cath Crock  49:45
Very interesting family, very creative family in different ways.

 Gill Phillips  49:50
Yeah. And it's spinning off into all your work, which I've just been fascinated to hear about. So I'll include the details in the programme notes as well but the key websites are ...

 Cath Crock  50:00
 Yes. So hushfoundation: hush.org.au/    And gatheringofkindness.org. And up on the front page at the moment is all the instructions on how to join the online event. So it's easy.

 Gill Phillips  50:16
Yeah, I had a look. It's fantastic. I think, "Oh, I want to go to all of this" and I think, actually it's in the night, but then you're recording them, aren't you, so so I'll see what I can do. 

 Cath Crock  50:25
Yeah, so you can see it in the daytime.

 Gill Phillips  50:27
I love the one, 'the unconscious bias' and some of those ones really link with some of the work I'm doing. I think that the whole programme really when you mentioned it. I'm just being told not to keep saying yes to everything. 

 Cath Crock  50:40
Oh, it's hard though when it's the stuff that brings me joy.

 Gill Phillips  50:45
It IS really hard.

Cath Crock  50:47
Yeah, yeah, this is important stuff.

 Gill Phillips  50:50
It's true. I won't be allowed to talk to you again. This has been an amazing conversation, Cath. Thank you so much.

 Cath Crock  51:01
Thanks, Gill. It's been lovely talking to you.

 Gill Phillips  51:05
And who spotted the extra contribor to the podcast? Did you hear him? 

 51:09
(Dog barking)

 Cath Crock  51:11
Sorry.
 
 Gill Phillips  51:11
Do you want to let the dog out? I could hear the dog.

 Cath Crock  51:17
I'll let the dog out. Okay, give me one second ... (laughing) ... OK, no dog.

 Gill Phillips  51:26
... I'm not sure if that is the fhe first dog on the podcast. It might be the second, I'm not sure.

 Gill Phillips  51:31
I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If so, please subscribe now to hear more of these fascinating conversations on your favourite podcast platform. And please leave a review. I tweet as @WhoseShoes. Thank you for being on this journey with me. And let's hope that together we can make a difference.