Making healthcare more human

On 28 March 2018, The Point of Care Foundation will be hosting its conference, ‘Making healthcare more human’, at the Wellcome Collection, London.

Barely a day passes without news of increasing pressure on the NHS workforce. Staff pay, recruitment, management targets, rising demand and winter pressures are all adding inexorably to the stress of delivering quality healthcare

We are here to support staff in maintaining the human aspects of healthcare in the face of these day-to-day challenges. We are part of a growing movement of healthcare professionals, clinical and non-clinical alike, who recognise that excellence in patient care stems from excellence in staff care. Our work with organisations, teams and individuals helps staff respond to the human needs of the people they treat, and support themselves and each other in facing the emotional and psychological challenges of their work.

Our spring conference on 28 March 2018, ‘Making healthcare more human’, is your opportunity to hear from patients and colleagues about humanising healthcare. Bringing together people from across the health system, we will consider how practically to meet the interconnecting needs of patients and staff.

Unlike other conferences, this will be a multi-professional event, focused on bottom-up change and the involvement of both staff and patients in the change process. It will be highly participative and interactive, stimulating ideas whilst also focusing on the practical ways to make a difference to both patients and staff.

You will be encouraged to challenge traditional ideas about the role of staff and patients, seeing patients as partners in the design process, and staff as people to be cared for too.

The morning sessions will include a patient discussion panel followed by forum theatre performed by Performing Medicine, which will draw on themes from the patient panel to perform scenarios where staff can provide more human care.

The afternoon will provide the opportunity for a conversation between staff and patients, encouraging both to think about what difference it makes when relationships between them are strong, as well as what enables/prevents these relationships from building. This will be followed by a keynote presentation from Professor Jill Maben, one of the foremost experts on the links between staff and patient wellbeing.

Our aim is to create a space which reflects our shared humanity and common goal to provide safe and compassionate care to every patient.

• To demonstrate the importance to patients of being seen as a person, what this means in practice, and the value for staff in being able to do so
• To demonstrate the importance to staff of being seen and treated as a person, what this means in practice, and the value to organisations of doing so
• To identify the conditions required to foster mutual respect and at what people in senior roles can do to create them
• To hear from national leaders and industry experts on how to improve service user and staff well-being

This conference will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with creating a more compassionate and humane health service.  We welcome interest from patients, carers and any healthcare professional or NHS employee.

Many directors of human resources and organisational development staff will attend, along with clinical leaders and others working to improve the experience of both staff and patients in the NHS.

• HR directors
• organisational development managers
• finance directors; medical directors
• improvement leaders
• NHS quality leads

CPD accreditation

The conference has been approved for CPD accreditation by CPD UK and certificates of attendance will be sent by email to all delegates after the conference.