Wild Card - Whose Shoes?

66. Dr Guddi Singh - Radically reimagining health care

• Gill Phillips @WhoseShoes

Share episode

In this electric, soul-stirring conversation, Dr Guddi Singh joins me to explore what it truly means to radically reimagine health. From the frontline realities of paediatrics to the bold edges of creative health and social justice, Guddi brings her full, vibrant self — and invites us all to do the same.

We talk about what’s broken in our health system, why simply fixing sickness isn’t enough, and how real health is built in homes and communities, not hospitals.

 We shine a light on creative co-production, interdisciplinary approaches, and the untapped power of arts, storytelling and relationships to transform healthcare.

Guddi describes herself as a closet creative and lifelong learner, and you’ll hear exactly why — from training citizen scientists to founding WHAM (Wellbeing and Health Action Movement) and leading the Powering Up project.

This episode is bursting with energy, honesty, hope¦ and a few well-placed mic drops.

Lemon lightbulbs 🍋💡🍋

🍋   Health is not built in hospitals – it’s built in our homes and communities

🍋   A child cannot be healthy if the context they live in is sick - we have to treat the context – hunger, poverty, poor housing – not just the symptoms

🍋   “I’m a closet creative trapped in the body of a doctor” : Guddi’s mission blends creativity, academia, activism, and medicine to drive meaningful change

🍋   The system doesn’t work for patients — and it doesn’t really work for staff

🍋   There’s no KPI for what actually matters — to patients or professionals

🍋   Maybe the most powerful KPI is: Will you remember this? Did it change you?

🍋   Human connection doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet – but it’s what makes the work meaningful.

🍋   Fixing health inequalities starts with ordinary clinicians and patients,  and creative approaches 

🍋  Powering Up isn’t a project – it’s a movement

🍋   It’s hard to lie to kids - Powering up unearthed the real issues

🍋   The system may be blind, but our stories can open its eyes

🍋   Dance saved my life. Why isn’t creative health part of the NHS mainstream?

🍋   We’re lighting up little patches of the world. What if we joined the dots?

🍋   We’re not alone — it’s time to bring our lemon lightbulbs together


Links:

Wellbeing and Health Action Movement (WHAM)

Powering Up Project

National Centre for Creative Health

Episode 54: Dr Mary Salama - connecting across boundaries

Episode 57 : Dr Tom Holliday - children get less


Join the Movement

This is more than a conversation It’s a call to action. Whether you’re a clinician, creative, policymaker or passionate citizen, this episode will leave you asking: 

What’s my role in radically reimagining health?

#coproduction


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 (Spotify or Apple are easiest to leave a review - navigate via 3 dots) 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.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Health inequalities, radically reimagining healthcare, creative co-production, patient voices, community health, social determinants, healthcare providers, interdisciplinary approach, mental health, quality improvement, patient engagement, healthcare system, creative methods, health inequalities action, community collaboration.

SPEAKERS

Guddi Singh, Gill Phillips

 

Gill Phillips  00:01

Today I'm very excited and honoured to be talking to Dr Guddi Singh, another wonderful paediatrician. I'll leave Guddi to introduce herself as much as possible, but I know she's a fabulous health campaigner and also a TV broadcaster and interested in the broader factors that contribute to the overall mind and body health of children and young people. We have so much to talk about here today. I'm sure this episode will build on previous conversations I've recorded with Dr Tom Holliday, Episode 57 talking about health inequalities in children's services and how children get less and also, specifically, Dr Mary Salama, Episode 54, with more examples of shaking up established, often system focused practices to make things much more child and family focused and help young people to get the best possible outcomes. Indeed, I first met goodie through my friendship with Mary Salama and I remember the three of us coming together at a wonderful event in Birmingham, talking about imaginative and collaborative ways to hear the voices of children and young people loud and clear, including a live question and answer session on stage with the powers that be answering their questions live, not least Matt Bowsman, Chief Executive of Birmingham Children's Hospital, extraordinary work, and I'm sure today's podcast will only touch the surface, but hopefully whet your appetite to find out more. So over to you, goody. I'll leave it to you to tell us more about who you are and the work that you do, and then we'll see where this exciting conversation leads. Well, thanks, Gill.

 

Guddi Singh  01:54

It's such a pleasure to be finally talking to you on this amazing podcast, and I feel very honored to be amongst that list of incredible people that you have already so let me just first of all say how delighted I am to be here talking to you. And it's always really funny, isn't it, when someone asks you, so what is it that you do? And I find and I find that the older I get, the harder it is for me to answer that question. And I think that's because there are many possible answers. But if I'm going to be honest, I think the best way to describe myself is that I'm a lifelong learner. And maybe even better than that is this, this phrase that I'm using now, which is that I'm a closet creative. And I think, I think you can tell that when you look at the list of things that I do, this is what happens when you're a broadcaster, you're an interdisciplinary academic, you're a helper candidate, you know, you're a writer, and you're all trapped in the body of a doctor, which is why and but I will say that there is one thing that combines all of that, and I hope we get to talk about that today, which is this mission that I'm on for radically reimagining health. And it's why I started my organization, the well being and Health Action Movement. It's why I started Powering Up that project that's focused on creative coproduction. And it’s because I genuinely believe, Gill that we’re not going to fix health inequalities, which is what I am passionate about, unless we put ordinary clinicians and patients at the centre of that.

 

Gill Phillips  03:14

So that is brilliant. Guddi, I think the concept of radically reimagining healthcare, that's what I associate with you, it really is. So tell us more about that. Why do we need to radically reimagine healthcare, what does that mean for Children and Families specifically?

 

Guddi Singh  03:44

Gosh, where do I begin Gill? Because I think I feel like my whole career has been about me feeling like a failure in a system that I've now come to realize just doesn't meet the needs of the people who are in it. So whether it's the patients who are first and foremost in my mind, but or even clinicians like me, or the people who are managing the system, or the people who are leading the system from the top, I just don't think the system works for any of us anymore. Now that's not to say that the system doesn't do a huge amount of good, and we're talking about the health system here, right? Health is central to all of us. It's it's what, you know, most of us stay up at night worrying about, and yet what we have is really a sick system. So the system is really good at treating sickness and disease, but when it comes to health, I feel like kind of misses the point. And you asked me, What is this whole thing about radically re imagining health? Ultimately, it comes down to this, health is not built in hospitals. It is built in our homes and our communities. And, as a paediatrician,, I see that all the time. Because the job description on the tin for me is treating sick kids. But if I actually want to make a difference, then I ought to be treating the parents and the families and the communities that these kids come from. Because the truth is that a kid cannot be healthy if the context that they're in is sick. And that's what my whole career has shown me, keeps showing me, and that's what my mission is about, which is actually like, can we as clinicians and people in the health system change the focus from disease, illness and individual people's bodies to the context and try and make the context healthy, so that we as individuals can also be healthy.

 

Gill Phillips  05:44

But That's incredibly powerful. And I had a mega like goosebump moment, I really did, because the groups that you described there are actually the groups that I use in Whose Shoes. So what does this mean to be a patient? What does it mean to be the family, the siblings? What does it mean to be the healthcare providers, the doctors, the nurses, everybody around that and the basic concept that you need to get it right, not just for the patients, but for everybody, and that children, more than or any of us you know, are so dependent on their families and part of that family and the parents have got to, you know, they might have other siblings, and they've got jobs, and they've got lives and so on, so to join things up for children and actually make it easier for the families and and that's why, I mean immediately Tom's episode, Tom holidays episode comes to mind because he was actually bringing clinicians away in quite an extraordinary, multi disciplinary way, rather than just referring people on to the next appointment with an unconnected health care professional. And the work that I'm doing at the moment, which I'm very excited about with Midlands Partnership Foundation Trust we've been developing Whose Shoes scenarios from those different perspectives, and it's just fascinating. And people don't see how one decision here is received somewhere else, either in the system or in the family, and how it's all interrelated. So I love the work that you're doing , Guddi, you know, I think you should be so proud of it.

 

Guddi Singh  07:23

You're really kind Gill I mean, honestly, I don't know if it I am proud of the work I'm doing, but not because I think what I'm doing is special. I just, I'm proud of the values that we've been able to hold on to in our organisation. We can talk about that a bit later. Yeah, the way that we run WHAM, the well being and Health Action Movement, the way that we've implemented powering up the project that I mentioned before, which is all about creative coproduction to address health inequalities with those who have the least voice. So in this case, young people, the values are what I'm proud of, and the fact that we've been able to live, live up to them, actually, because I think so I said that I'm an interdisciplinary academic, and probably loads of people are like, What the f is that? And, and I'll tell you what. Tell us I'm still trying to figure it out. Actually. Gill, oh my god, I had this PhD supervision this morning, and I was like, What am I doing? What am I doing? What it means is it means a little bit like what you were talking about. So we talk about multidisciplinary teams and in medicine, up until very recently, actually, it was just doctor knows best. Yeah, the truth is, the truth is that that's just one slice of the pie, right? There's a whole rest of it to look at, and it's a bit like that with knowledge and truth. Now I could just decide that I'm going to look at things from a public health lens or a very specific kind of natural sciences lens, but the truth is, then I would be missing out on all the things that history, politics, economics and social sciences have to teach us. And so my interdisciplinary PhD, which is primarily actually in philosophy, but is using the strands of everything else that is relevant and pertinent to health, is showing me that if you do put all of these lenses on health, actually you've got a much broader, more beautiful, deeper, richer picture of what health can be. But then the challenge then is that it requires us in the system, to be willing to take on these other kinds of tools, to actually think about what the solutions might be, because now you've got a more nuanced diagnosis, need a more nuanced prescription, you need a more nuanced treatment. And up until now, we've had very limited things that we can do within medicine. But if we're going to radically reimagine health maybe we could reimagine what tools we have available to us and what we might be able to do in the health profession and working with us outside the health profession, to think about actually, how do we keep communities healthy, families healthy, ultimately, kids, healthy? Yeah, and so the PhD, really, I suppose Gill is my way of trying to pretend that I know I'm talking about You certainly do! but mainly I'm making it up on the fly. And I think the joy of being able to do the work that I've been able to do recently with WHAM and with Powering Up has been to experiment and to play and to be creative and to just test out some of these ideas and theories, these intuitions that I have kind of deep in my stomach, but actually just seeing actually what happens if we try this in real life and and the lessons have been staggering for me, but I hope will also have relevance for other people as well.

 

Gill Phillips  10:39

Honestly, Guddi, as we talk. I mean, my mind just goes in so many different directions in terms of the links between, you know, what I stand for and with Whose Shoes. I think this is why we've come together so excitedly.

 

Guddi Singh  10:52

Really I always knew that we were like soul sisters in another universe. So, yeah, no, no, I I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised.really I always

 

Gill Phillips  11:01

And I think, I mean, you were talking then about, you know, having the opportunity to experiment, to play, to be creative. And I suppose with my Whose Shoes journey it's been, that's what I do. You know, I try things, and we have some fun, and it doesn't fit into the boxes, and then it causes grief. So then I get asked what what the evidence is. And we had somebody once, we had a really powerful workshop around maternity and with a bereaved mother talking and telling her story and the atmosphere in the room, I've been worried about it, because to take a board game effectively into more and more sensitive subjects. And I'd, I'd felt the atmosphere in the room, people were very supportive it. It was just so special, as people were listening and so genuine. And this, this woman telling her story, and everybody sort of just you could have heard a pin drop, but learning from it and taking so much from it, and someone from NHS, England had come along especially to find out about Whose Shoes and had a box to fill in on an Excel spreadsheet in terms of what difference it makes. And, you know, she more or less sort of quizzed me afterwards directly, then when I was still feeling emotional about what had happened. And, you know, you could feel the lemon light bulbs and the sparks around the room and the healthcare professionals feeling things, perhaps in ways that they hadn't done before, because they might not get that opportunity if it's not called a complaint or a debrief or after, you know something with a label, and you know, what do you say in those circumstances? Because I thought, well, you're not the right person. And I think that's what I've learned over the time that I've just tried to find, you know, to gravitate to the right people who not just that we're all of the same mindset, but who basically get what you're trying to achieve in terms of reimagining things and listening to people - and joint decision making. You know, for it not just to be a buzzword, but to be how things are done.

 

Guddi Singh  13:16

Oh Gill, the work you do is so central to this project of and by the way, you're you're part of it, you're part of the movement. You're radically reimagining health with us. And honestly, we're all in it together. The point is, it is a movement. Lots of us are doing it in different ways, at the fringes, at the moment, right? We're all at the fringes of the big thing that is health. But your question again, talk about shivers. It's cutting to my heart because it feels so relevant right now. Now I can give you the academic take on it, because in my PhD, I talk about the fact that there's lots of reasons why people like you and I are going to always feel like we're struggling against a system that is set up almost to be blind to what really matters, right to all the stuff that we know really matters to our patients, to the people in the working in the system, and yet the system itself seems to value other things, right? So if it wants numbers, it wants the hard in quotes, “the hard facts”, and it wants the business case for why something's going to be cost effective and efficient. And I can tell you, I'll be very bluntly honest, I don't give a shit if something is efficient, but I do care if it makes a difference to my patients. Exactly, yeah, and, and, and, there is no box in any key performance indicator. There's no KPI about what you know, what matters to patients. There's no KPI about what gives a doctor that morale and that boost when they're when they're in clinic. There is no KPI for what is it that keeps us in the job even when it's really hard? And you and we both know that people do this job even when it's hard, despite all of the issues that are going on in the NHS right now. Now, despite funding cuts, despite the media wanting to paint us to be the the enemy, despite the government trying to paint health workers as the reason why the system is failing, despite all of that, so many of us keep waking up, turning up to our jobs and giving 110% for our patients, because ultimately, what matters is actually the sacred thing that happens in those relationships, in those interactions. And what I've delighted in being able to explore through powering up and through WHAM actually, is relationships and building up new kinds of communities where we are not dependent on the system that is blind to what matters, and we create our own metrics for what matters, right? Yes, yes. And we start thinking about how we might want to measure success. And I was thinking about our chat Gill. And one of the words that did come up to me, what was this word success? You know, we talked about the fact that we're reimagining health. And I often feel like, you know, I need to redefine what success is to people. Because I'm just like, you Gill, I'm asked in these rooms, so then, so what's, what's the point of this, and why should we invest in this, and how much money you're going to save us, and and all these things, all these things. And I'm just kind of like, well, maybe, maybe what we're dealing with here is that you've got the wrong end of the stick, and the thing that you're chasing, which is profit largely. Maybe that's not success. Maybe having more money at the end of the month, or, you know, in your budget, isn't the metric to success here. What if we redefined it as having communities that are happier, having having a workforce that is more motivated and and performing it with a higher quality. What if? What if our metric for success was something entirely different to all the things that we are capturing on our spreadsheets and in in these calculations and in those tick boxes? And I say that at the same time as knowing that we live in the real world and knowing that for organizations like WHAM and powering up to grow, I have to somehow be able to draw in money and finances and support from investors and from people who might have the clout to be able to help us. And so I'm like, you, I'm stuck in this impasse of believing in a different world and wanting the world to be different, and yet having to speak to and make the story about why it might still fit the people in the old world. And I struggle, if I'm honest. Gill, I had a very difficult time last year. Powering up, and we can talk about powering up in more detail soon, but powering up was phenomenally successful last year, and yet I felt like a failure. I almost had a breakdown, and it's because it's so easy in this current situation, in this current setting, where people like you and I are trying to do good work, and we have to do so much with so little resource, that the only way it sometimes feels for us to be able to succeed is to burn ourselves out. And of course, that's not how it works. It can't work by that because if we are trying to radically reimagine health, then that should never be, that should never be the way it works. Right? I want to model to the young, and the team is full of these beautiful, young, diverse women. I want to model to them that they don't have to do this. They don't have to do what I did, right? They don't have to do this burning out. They don't have to be part of this hustle culture to to win, to make something successful, and yet, I'm trying to figure it out. Gill like, how do we do this? How do we how do we reimagine things at the edges of a system, and how do we make the case for getting support and help for what we're doing without selling ourselves?

 

Gill Phillips  19:01

It's … honestly Guddi. This is the most amazing conversation. I mean, this is my life, isn't it, really, and your life, it's all of the people that I know, really, you know, whether they're doctors, whether they're people working in the community, okay, I'll give you a little very topical case study. So there's an amazing organization called Grapevine in Coventry. So my local place, if you like, and I've been connected to them, probably for 30 years, and they are extraordinary, and they help people in the communities. It's a community based organization. They started off helping people with learning disabilities, and then it's become more around everybody - and social isolation and inclusion and all the rest of it. And they are, you know, I'm so proud of them, one of the best organizations I've come across. And, you know, their friends and their sort of local and then recently, they were faced with 45% cuts. They've spent probably the last three months. I'm not, you know, I perhaps shouldn't speak on their behalf, but this is my impression, naturally, you know, wondering what's going to happen to them and to the people they serve and to the staff they've got and so on, and then having to justify and so on. And then, now those cuts have been reversed. But what a bloody waste of money, you know? What? What a waste of all that emotion and the human stress and all that. But as a result of that, and I don't know whether it's something I say I haven't like researched this in detail. It's just like what I've gathered, but I've seen the most incredible report they've put together of what they've done and what they've achieved over those years. And I can recognize all those different campaigns they've had and the different groups of people, and they've had, you know, comments with people saying, you know, without you, we just go back to being, you know, just isolated at home. They've given people lives, and now in terms of the cost of the NHS, because this is more sort of social care based initiative. What did they save the NHS, in terms of prevention? What did they save society? And it's like the last podcast I did with Dorothy talking about her eyesight. Prevention is such a big thing, isn't it, because otherwise the NHS is picking up those sick and diseased people that you mentioned to cure, and they perhaps didn't need to be like that in the first place, but to try and join that up is just such. I don't know, it just feels impossible, doesn't it?

 

Guddi Singh  21:33

It feels impossible and yet I think Gill it is the task that's before us. I think it is the central key puzzle that needs to be solved for health in the 21st century. And you know, all of what you just described there, that incredible organization, the work that they've gone through, I recognize all of that, and I am nothing by comparison, right? I'm just one single paediatrician who, I mean, the truth is, Gill I've never really felt at home in medicine, right? And that's not just because I'm, you can't see me on this podcast, but I'm a small brown woman, right? I'm from a working class town in the Northeast of England, and I've been trying to make it in London's medical health system, right? So, of course, I didn't fit, right, but, but it's, it's more than that. It's because I just didn't, couldn't understand why they saw the world the way that they saw it and I had the naivety to start challenging it. And it's in that challenge …

 

Gill Phillips  21:33

You had the courage (Guddi laughs) no, but you did. You know, I'll pick you up on that, because, I mean, it may have turned out to be naive, and that you may have thought, I think I've been naive. I think you have to be naive to kind of put your head above the parapet and hope you can make a difference so but I think it's courage.

 

Guddi Singh  22:45

Well that,s … and you know what? I agree with you. I agree with you because it does take courage to do this right. It takes a huge amount of courage to stand up for what you think is right, even in the face of, basically, your boss is telling you that you're crazy for doing this stuff and and honestly, Gill, like I have been through a lot of different low periods in my career and in my life, and genuinely became depressed when I realized that my profession did not care whether my patients had enough food to eat, or what the house was like, or whether they had enough money to pay their heating bills. And honestly, the number of times I've been told by my bosses what what you worried about, sweetheart, that's not your job. That's someone else's job.

 

Gill Phillips  23:27

And so your job is, perhaps, to fix the asthma that's caused by the poor housing and the dampness, rather than to question their lack of resources and how that family have really got no chance.

 

Guddi Singh  23:41

And yet, if I you know, the conversations I've had with families, and the most important thing to them is the housing application, is the fact that they don't have enough money to feed their kids at home that night, and and so, you know, this is, this is, and this really is what my PhD is about. It's like, how do you how can you be good in a system that appears not to care? And I'm not saying it doesn't actually care. I'm not saying that there's not lots of individuals in their health system that do genuinely deeply care, but the system is almost set up like it doesn't care, because it's not it's almost Gill like it's not even, it's not even my job to fix the asthma. It's my job to get the patient out before they breach some kind of target before there's some kind of limit that's, you know, like an A and E, it's a four hour limit. And you get patient, you've got to get patient out before that, otherwise you're going to get trouble. Or it's a waiting list target, or there's other re there's an other marker of success which has got nothing to do with human wellness, nothing to do with health at all. They're just arbitrary standards that have been imposed by a bureaucrat, which maybe made sense at some point, but certainly don't make sense today. And so, um, I feel like I have become a troublemaker, but by mistake. Um. By being naive, by being courageous, whatever word you want to use, but by asking questions, by being curious, 100% 100% and there's nothing that the system hates more than people who are asking questions. But I think it is our secret power Gill, because anytime you ask a question, it begs the answer, and the answers …  can be fascinating if you start getting the right people around the table, and that's what I've been finding with powering up, because the very the whole premise of it is that we start getting different kinds of people around the table, and in getting that kind of genuine diversity, you get all sorts of creative, curious responses to health problems and stuff that, you know, even the most expert health leaders would not have thought of

 

Gill Phillips  25:51

brilliant. Yeah. I mean, curiosity, I think is, is one of our mega lemon light bulbs. And I think storytelling as well. Now that's probably, you know, probably set me off on a rant, because the NHS say that they like storytelling, and they want to hear lived experience, and they want to hear patient stories. Well, hey, I've got a few of those on this podcast, you know. And what gets me is, obviously, I'd like my podcast, because I put so much of myself into it and time and effort and love and so on, to be listened to. But more than that, it's not easy to tell personal stories. It's, you know, it's a it's a very courageous and a very big thing to do. So once somebody's done that, it would be great to think that the people who could actually be influenced by that would take the time and trouble to listen and to learn from it. But it feels like sometimes, in terms of perhaps actually sharing the podcast, or you've got two different worlds of we want lived experience stories, I think sometimes to have someone standing up at a conference, and that's another kind of bug bear of mine, that it can be so painful if you're going to get someone with lived experience to come and talk at a conference, you've got to nurture them. There's like people coming to a Whose Shoes workshop, you've got to nurture them all the way through the whole process, you know, long before they come in the room, all the way through and afterwards, rather than just having a tokenistic speaker or a tokenistic contributor, because then we can say that we've had, you know, I mean, say with Whose Shoes, you know, I'm proud that we've had travelers come to our events. We've had all sorts of different people, individuals and so on. But I want it to make a difference for them. And I know one of the very, very early Whose Shoes cards. I mean, this goes back 16,17, years, when I first set Whose Shoes up was, “I'm a carer, and I go along to all these listening events. But what difference does it make?” And that was actually on one of the cards. So I think that's perhaps what Whose Shoes has done in terms of the elephant in the room or opening the can of worms that you know, to put that juxtaposition together and get people to think, well, because to me, it can be more damaging to do so called coproduction, and then it stops, and people don't even get the chance to hear what happened as a result of it. You've got to make it a relationship, the word that you use, and carry it forward in everything you do. And it’s hard.

 

Guddi Singh  28:22

Oh, it's exactly that. It is hard if you're doing it right. It is hard. And you know this, because you do do it right, and you do care about making it right. And, oh God, again, everything that you said Gill just resonates with me so much, because it is the reason I love you, Gill is because, is because you are genuine. You're one of those few people in this world who is real and and I love that about you, and I love that you are honest and you're transparent, and you're just genuine, genuine. You genuinely care. You're doing this for all the right reasons, and it's why I'm in it too, and it's well now, and it's powering up … And you! oh, thank you. And it's

 

Gill Phillips  29:05

This is why we're together

 

Guddi Singh  29:09

Yeah, 100%, we're talking to each other now, yeah. And it's what powering up is my attempts. And just like Whose Shoes is for you, is my attempt to make it bigger than just us, right, as individuals. And powering up asks all those questions, right? Which is that, what does meaningful health coproduction look like? What does it look like if we genuinely put people in the driving seat, and not just tokenistically, not just in a way that helps us to tick a box and be like, Yep, we've got our diversity candidate. We've rolled them out, and then we wheel them away again, which, by the way, I've been that person as a brown woman, I'm often the person who's the tick box that they can just be like, yeah, we've we've ticked our diversity box. And that that's happened on the media as well as in the health service. I'll tell you that. But that aside, my point is that if we are going to try and do this properly, and we genuinely want to know what ordinary people have to say, we need to start building the mechanisms by which there is a conduit to hear this, because at the moment, there is nothing. There are no channels of communication between ordinary people on the ground and the leaders who are running the health service. And I believe that what we even need before that is conduits between patients and their clinicians, because that's where the most interesting, intimate, juicy stuff is happening, right? Yeah, it's the interface where ordinary people come up against the health system, and it's actually where the most genuine care can take place, right between, say, for example, me and you in a clinic, if you came to see me, which you would be outside my age range, because I just do pediatrics. But let's imagine,

 

Gill Phillips  30:46

let's imagine my grandchild, right?

 

Speaker 1  30:49

Exactly. So imagine you brought your grandchild and but you were there as well. I would see all of you, all however many of you as my patient, I'd be thinking, Okay, let's, let's hear from all of you about what needs to happen, and if we're being serious about putting your concerns first, actually, I might need to put my concerns last. And the health system currently has lots of things that it considers are important, and they're not, therefore not listening to what's actually on the minds of patients and what they need. Now, I'm not saying that we should just throw medicine out the window. I'm not at all saying that biomedical science has no role to play and how to make you well. Of course, I'm not, but what I am saying is that at the moment, there is no way, there's no mechanism by which patients can have their voices heard and respected in a way that is able to draw the lessons out and and to then feed it in, to change, into improvement, into quality improvement, whatever words you want to use, yeah, and this is why I'm working with Mary Salama, who you mentioned. She’s an incredible pediatrician in Birmingham. She runs something called the Canal project with her colleagues there. And Mary's mind, as you know, Gill is crazy, but is also magnificent, because she thinks very, very brilliantly about systems,

 

Gill Phillips  32:13

She does

 

Speaker 1  32:14

Yeah, and how to and how to change them, how to challenge them, and how to bring them towards where our patients need them to be and with her, I've been able to make powering up work. So we just so you've got a bit of background. So powering up is this pilot project where we got a little bit of money from the Health Foundation to basically test this idea of so if we're going to try and bring ordinary people, patients into the center of health system redesign, what needs to happen? Our proposition was that maybe we need to try creative methods. And so we are using, amongst others, arts, dance music, poetry, theater, and using science methodologies, weirdly, but putting science in the hands of ordinary patients. So the pilot was kind of almost like a one of those, a trial. I'm going to use a very grand word that we basically had two arms, one in Birmingham, one in London, and in Birmingham, Mary was in charge of us using science methodology, basically training up a whole generation of young kids to be citizen scientists and to figure out what was happening in terms of health problems in their own communities for themselves, right? And in London, what we did was the other end of it, where we used the arts to help young people again in deprived communities, to express what is happening to them in ways that actually open up conversation, as opposed to closing down. Because anybody knows that, if you get a teenager in a room and you'd get a boring old doctor like me to talk to them. They clam up, but put them in a room where actually, with other doctors who are turns out much less good at dancing, theatre, rap than they are.

 

Gill Phillips  33:56

There's a surprise.

 

Guddi Singh  33:58

They open up and they tell you things they would never, ever have told you in clinic I have learnt things about young black men in South London that I know for a fact they would never have had the courage to tell me in a clinic room through working with them in this way with the arts,

 

Gill Phillips  34:15

that's amazing. I know it's amazing. It really is amazing, yeah,

 

Guddi Singh  34:20

and the fact is, Gill, those interactions that occurred through our engagement work, the relationships still live. They're strong. They want to be our friends. They want to stay in touch with us, because they trust us. They believe in us.

 

Gill Phillips  34:34

Yeah, that word trust.

 

Guddi Singh  34:35

Oh yeah. Huge, huge. And we didn't talk about it enough, do we in the NHS?

 

Gill Phillips  34:41

No. Wow. So I had the privilege, as I said briefly, I think in the introduction to come along to the event in Birmingham. Now, here's perhaps a KPI, okay, here's a KPI, which conferences that you've been to in your lifetime. This is a rhetorical question. Do you remember? Yeah, not so rhetorical, and that event in Birmingham will stay with me for the rest of my life. Oh, so that that could be quite a good KPI. And the reason that it will is because it was vibrant. It was real. It had the young people from Birmingham way outside their comfort zone, a lot of them, apart from the one who could have been leading a team on The Apprentice, presenting to us the audience, and to their peer groups, and to other schools, which I think can often be harder, in terms of what will they think of me at school tomorrow and bullying, or whatever it might be, and all coming together on the stage presenting their findings about the projects they'd done around mental health, asthma drugs. I think, you know, I'm remembering, and this is just off the top of my head, the different topics and how I thought, Oh, my goodness, at that age, I couldn't have done that. Or perhaps I'd have been that one there with the sheet. I've been told to be on the stage, but you know, I'm not putting myself forward. You could see that there was all sorts of different levels of comfort with it, in a way, but that they'd have all come away from it really proud of themselves, I would hope. And then the more confident ones doing a question and answer. Oh, my goodness, from the audience with was it the Deputy Head of Public Health in Birmingham, the Chief Exec of BWCH and you were on the panel, Guddi. But for the young people, it was huge, wasn't it? And the questions were real, and I thought the answers were real, yeah, you know, I do think that's a huge credit to the whole process as well, because you get used to politicians type answers in some of these situations. But, you know, it really felt as if they were listening to the young people and wanting to be, you know, working with them.

 

Guddi Singh  36:57

Yeah, and I was just going to say, I'm so pleased to hear that you enjoyed that event that you came to and that you will never forget it, because one of the things that has always been my secret goal is to to not just reimagine health, but reimagine all of it, reimagine the education around it, the events around it, so to reimagine a conference, to reimagine what teaching looks like, what And that's exactly what we managed to do there, right? And yet again, all credit to Mary, who pulled that event off, and who got the right people, the right speakers. That thing that you said about, oh, the responses were real. Do you know what? It's really hard to lie to kids. Yes, it's really hard to lie to kids and getting children, let's be honest, they're children to question those people in power and to show them on their hands, just be like, This is what's happening to us. This is what we're experiencing. This is what we're suffering. Tell us what you're doing about it pretty powerful, isn't it really,

 

Gill Phillips  37:53

really powerful. So I would absolutely, I mean, as I really felt privileged to go along to that, I didn't realize how few kind of external people were coming along. I thought I'd be one of, like, a big audience, but I wasn't You were one of the select few! I was one of the select few, and I just found it just a really wonderful experience and very, very informative. You know, I learned a lot from it. And in terms of, you know, making my work more informed, it's all part of that, isn't it, but the more natural link to me would be the creative side. Oh, yeah, if I enjoy Mary's science based event that much, how much possibly more Mary won’t  like this, would I enjoy seeing first hand perhaps, what happened, you know, with the arts based I mean, I can relate to that, because I use poetry a lot in issues and use creative methods. We had a workshop recently, a maternity workshop in Ireland, where the midwives came in to Blue Suede Shoes, you know, I get it, you know, and obviously the graphic facilitation and so on, yes, but the work that you're doing, you know, directly with young people and with Rap and so on. I'm just so fascinated by that. It's amazing.

 

Guddi Singh  39:04

Oh, you know, I wish, I wish, Gill that we'd had you there. It would have been, you'd have to have lived in London for a week. So let me just explain what we did. So it was a bit of a different model to what we did in Birmingham. So in Birmingham, we went to, like, lots of different schools, we engaged with up to 80 young people in a like a distributed way over a long period of time, was what we did in London and this so the arm in Birmingham was called Listen up, because we were listening to young people. The arm in London was called Show up. And it was about shows and theaters and showing up, on on, on this platform, yeah. And it was a very intense week. So five days, just five days where we had this amazing theatre group from collage arts, and this amazing theatre practitioner called Steve Medlin, who, oh my gosh, like is absolute genius. So he was in charge of helping us to bring together two groups. So it wasn't just young people. We had a group of clinicians and a group of young people at a school, and the idea was to get them to coproduce through art, some expression of what it's like to be a doctor in the system right now and to be a young person in the system right now and at the end of five days. Now, remember, these people never met each other before. At the end of five days, we produced one music video, two music tracks, four drama sketches, three choreographic dancers and 12 poems. Wow, yeah, and and all from scratch, right? That's all just happened in those five days, and we performed it all at the end, in front of this live audience at the Science gallery in July last year. And and I have to say, I've never been prouder in my life Gill than what happened that day.

 

Gill Phillips  40:54

Oh I can believe it. I'm proud, you know, so proud just hearing about it. I think it's just wonderful, really wonderful.

 

Guddi Singh  41:01

And again,, we had a similar model deal, you know, that thing of like, we had people who were important in quotes in the audience, as well as, like, you know  us. So we had, again, we had people from the South Bank Centre in the audience. We had people from the South East London ICB in the audience. We had local other people from local public health and charities in the audience. And again, the idea, just as you said, Gill is like, if stories matter, then listen if stories matter, then listen to these young people, because they are bearing their hearts and souls for you right now, to tell you what it's like. And I mean, I know that the performances were powerful, and I know that even in just five days, we were able to produce something actually really compelling. But what was really interesting, Gill, was it? There was that question again from the audience, which is that, oh, so. So what do we do with this? So what does, what difference will this make?

 

Gill Phillips  41:55

So it's not a video, it's only an audio, so people can't see me banging my head on the desk.

 

Guddi Singh  42:04

Yeah, we need a little gift there. It's, yeah, it's um, and, you know, look, I get it. I get it. They they have bottom lines that they have to think about. They have, like, a system that they need to I have so much sympathy for these people, because I know that they're good. I know they're good people. They want things to change, but they are trapped in a system that doesn't have the creativity and flexibility to imagine beyond these bounds. But that's what you and I are for Gill and we will, we will start showing them that things can be different, whether in the way that we run these our own organizations, or in the way that we start implementing programs. And ultimately, it's about collaboration, right? So the reason I work with Mary is because I know that we're stronger together than we are separately. And with you Gill, of course, it's the same, isn't it? All of these relationships add up to so much more than the sum of our parts. And so there's something about here, when you can see that someone vibrates at the same frequency as you, is to move towards that right and to think, actually, how do we bring our voices together in chorus, so that they are louder, that they amplify the message? Because, again, the truth is, if I'm just shouting by myself, no one's gonna hear me. But maybe, if you know you where you're at Gill Mary in Birmingham. I'm in London. If we're all doing it, and it's across the country, maybe there's a chance that it might just get picked up and heard and might change some people. I will tell you that the young people and the clinicians who took part in our project are changed forever. Yes, yes, yeah. And, and weirdly, you would think I was the young people who got the most out of it. No, it was the clinicians that got the most out of it. We had, okay, this is maybe a bit of a sad statistic, but no, no men. No male clinicians applied to be part of this thing. Don't know if that says something really, yeah, which is just interesting in of itself. But all of the women, almost all of them, come from quite diverse backgrounds, which, again, says something, because they all cared deeply about dealing with health inequalities, and I wonder if that's just because they understand it from a very personal experience. Yeah. But what's really interesting is that so many of these young women, when they started off on this week, this five day experience, were and you can't see me, but shoulders were kind of crouched heads down. They're not making eye contact. They're terrified about the idea that they're gonna have to start terrified performing in some way. Yeah, none of them, or maybe there was one of them, but hardly any of them thought that they were creative. And by the end of the five days, they are projecting their voices out to the end of the room. They are taking up space. They are looking  the audience in the eye, and they are embodying what they always had inside. But yeah, believe that they could bring to your Well, in this case, the stage. But like, let's be honest to their jobs, to their jobs. Yeah,

 

Gill Phillips  44:57

yes, yeah.

 

Guddi Singh  44:58

And so like, you know, I know. I saw them change in those five days. They're different people.

 

Gill Phillips  45:03

And it does apply across the board. I mean, you know, again, all sorts of thoughts going through my head. I mean, my youngest son's a teacher. We talk a lot about these sort of things. And you know, some of it's confidence, isn't it, to bring your whole self into a job, but it applies as a healthcare professional, as a teacher, for all of us. And the other thing I was going to pick up on, well, couple of things. And you mentioned finding someone who vibrates to the same frequency. I'm going to I'm going to pinch that one. I love that. So that's because I don't normally do scientific analogies. Yeah, that's a really good one. But I think, you know, perhaps more seriously, good people, you mentioned good people. And I think what went through my head there in terms of my work and the Whose Shoes workshops and so on. I mean, obviously the whole thing is difficult, like, to find the team that can make the time, you know, to have a workshop, and can prioritize the time for staff to go along and to have the courage to talk to other people and to think through who those other people might be, and actually get them into the room, all of that. But what encourages me, and I mean, I think it's very in tune with what you was saying, Guddi, is that people, people want to do well. They they came into those roles because they wanted to make a difference almost 100% and, you know, I can be told, oh our team’s a bit jaded at the moment, you know, or we've had a bad experience of coproduction in the past. All this kind of negativity can perhaps be there in the background, but I promise you, if you bring them into a room where people feel valued, and, you know, things like refreshments, and we have bunting, and we have fun, and, you know, that's what I was trying to explain, with it being a sort of process right the way through, rather than just an event On the day, and you create in terms of what we do, the conditions for people to have open, honest conversations. You can feel them becoming empowered during that session, and you can feel them, you know, perhaps someone at the end making a pledge that they'd never have dreamt of making at the beginning. So it's the same process, in a way, isn't it? That, you know, I loved hearing about your healthcare professionals who are not creative people put themselves in boxes, don't they, and if you can get them out of that box just a little bit, they can become the biggest champions, really.

 

Guddi Singh  47:32

Oh, it's, it's, it's so powerful this work. And just again, hearing you talk about your process, and just seeing the parallels and how, how aligned our work is. Gill like I think it is. I mean, clearly it does belong in the same family of projects and thinking and work that we're trying to do. But you're so right that the reason that I, you know, I talked about how I'm a troublemaker, and I present a bit of a challenge to the medical establishment, because I don't fit into a box easily, and I don't fit into any box that they want to put me in, either. But I'm not the only one, right? There's so many of us in the system. In fact, probably all of us, none of us, want to just stay in our boxes and yet or stay in our lane. Oh, my God, the number of times I've been told to stay in my lane. And it just feels like, why would you clip people's wings in that way, right? Just when they're starting to learn how to fly, because the truth is that the NHS has this horrible tendency to make people believe that the only ones who are qualified to make change in the system are the ones who are in positions of power, people who have the qualifications in quotation marks, yes, the people who have the high positions, the status, the people who are got a very big salary. And I know, because I talk to them every single day, that the people who have got the best ideas are the ones who are on the ground, doing the work, facing the friction, and who have come to figure out that actually something that needs to change, and they've already figured out what has to happen, but they have to do it in the margins, because they won't get, you know, the support or the clearance from their bosses right to do this stuff. And, you know, Gill, I started on this path of thinking about change and thinking about health inequalities through doing work on poverty. So, like I as a very young registrar, so that's like a middle grade doctor in junior doctor, realizing that most of my patients’ problems were not medical, right? Their problems were social in origin. But as a doctor, I had no prescription for that, and so I was really clutching at straws, thinking about, well, I can't, like, how can I just send people home like this. This is not okay. And you know, I started off doing things like giving people money, but that's not okay. I started trying to, like, steal sandwiches from the hospital, but that's also not okay, right? So there's me …

 

Gill Phillips  49:51

But desperate to help them with what they actually needed at that point,

 

Guddi Singh  49:54

Yeah, there’s me trying to be good, and yet breaking rules that you know, probably put me. And like, I would be in trouble, you know. And I'm able to say this now because I'm a consultant, I'm in a position where, like, you know, hopefully it's okay. But the point is that it's actually very difficult in that situation to know what to do, and yet I learned to try and subvert the system so it was never okay. I got told off all the time for spending extra time, for spending extra time with these patients, for finding out about their social problems, about doing a really good social history, and understanding that actually, this woman is not safe to send home tonight and where, therefore, there's no why are we trying to get them out to the department, like all sorts of that was not okay. But what was okay, Gill is doing quality improvement projects. They love it when you do a quality improvement project

 

Gill Phillips  50:43

Called a quality improvement project. So so it would have to have that name and be in a spreadsheet,

 

Guddi Singh  50:50

Yes, and, and, and suddenly my quality improvement project on poverty was … now. I was allowed to spend time thinking about it now. I was allowed to to do. Honestly, it was me just trying to do the right thing, but by stealth, yeah, yeah, the Trojan horse, right? It's just like, oh yeah, here's this thing and, and, you know, like, I have to thank my colleague, Hannah Zhu, who is with with me, and another colleague helps to start the well being in Health Action Movement, wham, but it was Hannah and I whose first started doing this work on poverty, addressing poverty in clinical settings. And you know, we just started with little, tiny QI projects. We just tried, in a very small, amateurish way, to try and do something about it. We tried to publish it, because we wanted to share that knowledge with other people. And it was in that response to what we had written that we realized that other people care about this right. Other people desperately want to know what to do, and that was why we formed an organization around it called WHAM, the well being and Health Action Movement, which exists to inspire, unite and empower clinicians who want to take action and health inequalities. So do more than just the lip service that you talked about, but to actually take action, to actually do something.

 

Gill Phillips  52:08

Yeah, so how can people get involved in this movement Guddi, what sounds kind of like lemon, light bulb moments and our call for action? What do you think? What do you think we should be saying?

 

Guddi Singh  52:20

That's a really good question. It possibly depends on who you are in this situation. Like WHAM is a clinician facing movement. It is about empowering clinicians very much. But WHAM exists alongside powering up, because, like I said right at the beginning, we are never going to fix health inequalities until we put ordinary patients and clinicians at the centre of radically reimagining health. And it happens when you put people together in relationships, not when you think about things in silos, right in isolation. And so your question of like, oh, how do I get involved? Or what do I do? Whoever you are, whether you are on the one side of the doctor's desk or the other and by the way, it's not just for doctors, it's for every type of medical professional, obviously, because, let's be honest, none of us are doing this in isolation, right? You might want to join WHAM, so you might want to literally become one of our members. Join us. You might want to join the team. You might want to help us to think about what we're doing. We have a great website. We have a developing set of tools. You look at our website, we have all sorts of tools and templates that we are developing and trying to help to share with other clinicians across the country. We have been helping other people with their own QI projects across the country. Again, what we want is for people to take what we did and improve on it, because it can be improved and it can be developed and it can be made much better. And we just want people to feel like we're giving them the wings that maybe they felt, feel like they've been clipped elsewhere, and that they have permission to experiment, to play, but to do it on something that they care about. They all care deeply about, making sure that their patients aren't hungry when they go home, that they do have a safe home to go to, and so I'm literally building this team right now. Gill, I'm looking for bright young people. I say young. You can be any age. I don't get care

 

Gill Phillips  54:12

There’s hope for all of us. (Laughter)

 

Guddi Singh  54:16

I guess. I guess what I need is energy, energy. I need energy. And I need, oh, that word naivety. I need that enthusiasm, that unfiltered enthusiasm for like, yes, we're going to change the world. Yes, that's what we're doing right now, is we're trying to change the world, and I'm trying to build WHAM as an organization. But I'm also looking for people to help me to think about, how do you like you said, Gill, how do you make something like, Whose Shoes or powering up something that can sustain itself and can be spread to more than just the few locations that we were at. How do you make it something that's embedded into a system so that it can continue to feedback and continue to help the system to learn over time and to iterate? And it's so that it's kind of the fabric. The thing, as opposed to just like a nice little add on here Exactly. It's not just the badge, but it is the clothing that you're wanting to wear. So there's something about needing help from people, whoever like, whether you've got money, whether you've got, like, nous about how to run a business, or whether you understand the health system, whether you have power, and you can just bring it into your local health system. I don't know who's listening to this but, but I hope what you're hearing when you're hearing Gill and I talk is a real desire to genuinely change things, as opposed to just pay lip service to change. And also that we have the values that I think are core to this, which is a real belief in justice, a real belief in equality, genuine equality, a real belief in hearing the voices of those who are normally marginalized and doing it honestly. You know, I mean it like I know. And the moment I met you, Gill, I knew that you were the real deal. That's really nice. You know what? Though Gill, it's really hard to fake it.

 

Gill Phillips  56:05

It is, I think, I really think it is. And, you know, I see myself, I sort of connect with people. It is that genuine authenticity, I think, isn't it? So a couple of episodes ago, I spoke to my very good friend, Dorothy Hall. She's 82 it's a cracking episode, if anybody wants to listen to an 82 year old taking on the system around NICE guidelines, procedures, processes, equality. Oh, my goodness. Such a lovely way, such a lovely human way. And, you know, trying not to be specifically, trying not to be moany and complaining, but to be constructive. But the end of Dorothy's podcast is, I think, her final lemon light bulb that we concluded on was to have honest conversations. And you've just said exactly the same Guddi. And I think this whole, you know, whether it's older people, whether it's people with learning disabilities, I've just spoken to Nicola Enoch, whether it's young people, I think everybody wants to be listened to and for healthcare professionals to have honest conversations about these really tricky challenges that are central to the way forward, really, and reimagining things for people, rather than just for systems.

 

Guddi Singh  57:25

Oh, 100 100% and the thing about having honest conversations is also for the health professionals themselves, for us in the system. Because, you know, I mentioned in passing, really, like the mental health issues and the fact that, like, it's very difficult. The job that we do is very difficult, but it's made all the more difficult when the system itself doesn't allow for you to be weak, in quotes, right? Doesn't allow for you to have problems, doesn't allow for you to to fail in that way. And the reason I you might, I mean, I don't know if anyone is wondering why or how this doctor ever got into creative health, but I can tell you why, because it saved my life and and the arts saved my life well, because I went through my own period of I told you about this depression, I went, Yeah, she did. I realized that, you know, the system wasn't made for me, and actually I was made to feel like I didn't fit into the system. The number of times I was told that I wasn't cut out to be a doctor, you would. I mean, yeah, it just says everything. And again, you know, remember, I'm a woman of color from the northeast of England, I don't fit in, and I already feel like I'm less than and then I'm also then being told that my questions are just not welcome, that I'm thinking about all the wrong things. And then, and then what happens, which is what always happens in medicine, is that there's a show, and then patients die, and I blame myself, and I just presume it's because I'm not good enough to be a doctor. And there was a moment when I would have left the profession and might have even given up on life, had it not been for the fact that I stumbled into Bollywood dance classes, which I hate exercise, by the way. Gill like, I absolutely hate exercise, which is why it was never going to be the gym for me. But going to dance,

 

Gill Phillips  59:12

yeah, that's another thing we've got in common. I've signed up for dance bit. I'm ready.

 

Speaker 1  59:16

It's so interesting. I just like this. This class switched on a light which had been off inside, in me. And yes, it was the music, and obviously Bollywood. I'm of Indian origin. There was something that was obviously speaking of home for me there. But there was also just being able to look in the studio mirror and seeing other women, largely very diverse group of women who, again, like me, had been able to throw off the shackles usual social roles or their cultural norms, and were literally just shaking their booty and having an amazing time and feeling sexy and confident and all the things that we didn't feel outside of that room. And you know. Like in that room, I was able to recover a sense of myself, I suppose, and joy and fun. And I remember looking in that mirror and thinking, if I can feel this good doing this, why can't my patients? Yeah, and, and it was through that, that moment, that light bulb, that lemon light bulb, moment, that I started introducing dance to the paediatric ward. So it was at that time, and I was a junior doctor at the time, we started doing dance classes in Barnett Hospital in North London. And again, I had an amazing boss who helped facilitate this. But this is, this is the thing, right? You need to have people who believe in you, yeah, who are able to be those power brokers to kind of help you to shift systems slowly but surely in the direction you wanted to go. But we did that. We did this thing where we had a nurse teaching doctors how to dance again, flipping the hierarchies, reimagining it all, and it worked a treat, Gill’s

 

Guddi Singh  59:16

I bet it did! (Laughter), You know the morale on this Ward had been really low, and then turnover of staff had been really, really low. But people started wanting to stay on this ward. They had they started to know who each other's first names. Yeah, they started wanting to have coffee with each other, like, just for the cultural shifts alone. But obviously the patients were also watching all of this and realizing that, oh my, doctors and nurses are human beings, and yes, they do look silly dancing, but wow, I love them more now, because I realize that they're just human. They're just like us. And so there's this whole thing of where, for me, I've just like the arts are really powerful, but we don't use them enough in our health settings. And whether it's because, you know, I don't care what you use the arts for, whether it's to help you start to have a conversation, or to have that honest expression between each other, or whether it's just to have a bit of fun and to get a bit of exercise and movement into what you're doing. To me, there's all of these benefits. And I can tell you, from my own experience, it's good for your mental health, too. The point is that there's all of these benefits to it, and yet, and yet, we don't it's not part of the NHS offerings yet, and this isn't even despite the WHO World Health Organization sanctioning all sorts of there's been decades worth of research on this and creative health, it's the biggest kept secret in health. Gill, and I don't know why they're keeping it secret.

 

Gill Phillips  1:02:18

Shall we let it out of the bag Guddi? Shall we?

 

Guddi Singh  1:02:19

Let's let it out. Ah, people, people should be using creative health everywhere, whether it's for education, whether it's with it, literally as therapy, it can bring so many benefits and and is often way cheaper than any drug, yeah, and, and just for depression alone, it's more effective than antidepressants like, why are we not using this? Why are we not doing this? I don't understand. I do not understand So it's that kind of thing where I've been turned on to creative health now for years through my own personal experience and using it with my patients. I know it works. This is also why I'm on the board of the National Centre for Creative health, the ncch, great organization, which is all about trying to bring together the worlds of academia, practitioners, governments, to try and think about actually, how do we make this a thing? But? But the reality is now that I'm trying to make this happen for myself. In powering up, I'm realizing that it's still not there yet. Because we talked about this, no one seems to be wanting to throw money at me, and I'm just like, but look, it's working. I've got living, breathing examples of people doing it People love it, yeah, and it's not that expensive. Like, come on, you're gonna save money in the long term. So we're on that journey. We're trying to let the secret out about creative health

 

Gill Phillips  1:03:38

Let”s let the secret out.

 

Guddi Singh  1:03:39

But I'm just constantly enthralled by the fact that the system is blind. It's blind to what really matters. It's blind to the fact that social factors matter more than medical it's blind to the fact that creative methods are probably more important here than scientific methods. And it's blind to the fact that being human is so much more important than being that robot that you think you need to be. And it's, it's it just, it just feels like, If only, if only, there was a way for us to undo all of that, to just, like, almost reboot the system. You know, when you your computers, like, turn it on, start again. Is it? Yeah, turn it off. Start again. That spinning wheel of doom, where it's just kind of spinning, as I'll do, nothing's happening, and it just is thinking about it like instead, if we could just restart, reboot and and then what would happen if we could start from ground zero together and get patients to be in on that? I mean, that's really what powering up is about, and what my journey is about with radically reimagining health and Gill like I know that we're going to be friends forever. Yeah, we should. We should think about this like, what do we do, and how do we bring all of these threads together? Because one of the things I'm very conscious of is that often in this system that we work in, you're made to believe that you're on your own and you have to do your own little thing. And we are in our little pockets, our own little projects, and we're all like. Separately, trying to create these lemon light bulbs. And of course, it's beautiful because we're lighting up little patches of the world ourselves, but it is all about collaboration and connection

 

Gill Phillips  1:05:12

And so we're not alone. We're not alone. I mean, it reminds me this, perhaps provocatively, it's just gone through my head. The post office scandal was telling everybody that they were the only one, they were the only one, and making them feel that they were the problem and they got it wrong. But the power of people coming together, and apart from anything, it makes it more doable, and it makes it more more fun, and I think it makes all of us a little bit bolder, because it, you know, it can be frightening contact on your own, and people put you down. I mean, you know, we've got, I mean, I knew this would happen. Guddi, we literally could talk all day, so we’d better not, because otherwise nobody will listen. But you know, we've got so many shared stories. I mean, I basically jumped ship from my day job because I didn't fit anymore. And it's all too often, the story of people who really, actually care and want to do something within their job, whether it's in their job description or not, whether it's the kind of, you know, meeting the KPI or not. And I think there's another whole episode about arts in the NHS. Oh, yeah. So whether you would come back and talk another time, that would be amazing.

 

Guddi Singh  1:06:19

Oh, I'd love to and, and, yeah. I mean, look, Gill, you are an inspiration for all sorts of reasons. But again, it does come back to what you said, that whole thing of courage, right? Having the courage to walk away from something as much as walking towards something, right? You're walking away from security, from Status, Security

 

Gill Phillips  1:06:37

and your salary, all of it, yeah, and

 

Speaker 1  1:06:42

I hugely admire you, and I think the reason WHAM exists is to give people that community that they were, that I felt alone right doing this work, and I don't want anyone ever to feel like they're they're weird, or they're a loser or they're an outsider for caring about their patients any more. And that's why WHAM exists to provide that community, to provide that community of practice where you can share those ideas, you can have solidarity, you can talk about and maybe get some of that care that the system is not able to give you. And so I think, I think what, what we're talking about here is actually forming these communities of practice, but there's communities of care, yes, and each you know, whether it's Whose Shoes canal project or WHAM and powering up somehow for each other, being sounding boards and places where we can, just like talk about our struggles and also learn from each other is often half the battle, I think,

 

Gill Phillips  1:07:33

And I think we can share in the show notes for this podcast whatever links that you want, Guddi so the WHAM project and the other things that you've mentioned, we could add to those, you know, over time, if that becomes a community of practice of people listening in the future, you know, I think it's all about building together, isn't it?

 

Guddi Singh  1:07:50

Yeah, yeah. I love the idea of building together, and yeah, if you're building anything, Gill count me in

 

Gill Phillips  1:07:56

so huge thanks. Guddi It's been so wonderful talking to you, just so many different things that you've said and ways that that conversation could have gone. You know, it's just so rich, really, but I hope that we've used the time well in terms of getting across our key messages.

 

Guddi Singh  1:08:16

Oh Gill, honestly, it's such a pleasure to talk to someone as intelligent and as emotionally in tune as you, and I think whatever else, I've …, I've had a ball.

 

Gill Phillips  1:08:31

We’ve enjoyed ourselves anyway,

 

Guddi Singh  1:08:33

But also I feel like I've learned more about you through this conversation. And I realized, likewise, yeah, I think we're so more aligned even than I thought. And so, yeah, I feel like it's bought us closer. So I think that's a real gift. So thank you. I.