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    Finding My Professional Heart: A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners
    Finding My Professional Heart: A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners
    Finding My Professional Heart: A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Finding My Professional Heart: A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners

    By Natius Oelofsen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Finding My Professional Heart is a short e-book by the author of the highly regarded Developing Reflective Practice.

    It provides a guide to compassion and mindfulness for health and social care students and practitioners and a roadmap for developing compassionate practice.

    Drawing on both neuroscientific research and the contemplative traditions, the book argues that compassion is not a competency that can be trained, but a way of practising care that can be cultivated and nurtured. It attempts to inspire the reader to become a compassionate practitioner by:

    • Giving an overview of the concept of compassion that encompasses modern as well as ancient perspectives.
    • Considering some ideas on how to become compassionate and discussing the enemies of compassion.
    • Providing a small sample of scientific research into compassion and presenting an overview of a neuroscience-based model of compassion.
    • Exploring the links between mindfulness and compassion.
    • Providing some guidelines and a roadmap for cultivating a compassionate outlook and approach.
    • Offering a set of meditations and practices that can be used along the way.

    At the heart of health and social care is a healing encounter between people, and this book aims to put compassion and humanity back at the centre of care.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLantern Publishing
    Release dateJul 30, 2016
    ISBN9781908625397
    Finding My Professional Heart: A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners
    Author

    Natius Oelofsen

    Natius Oelofsen is a consultant clinical psychologist trained in South Africa and the UK. He has worked in the UK’s NHS for 18 years in a variety of settings, including children’s services, adult mental health and learning disabilities. Currently, he is in full time private practice, specialising in mental health and neurodiversity across the life span. He runs the Psychology Consultancy (https://helpwithmentalhealth.net) which is a specialist provider of psychological help, consultancy and training to individuals, teams, and organisations in the public and private sectors.

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      Book preview

      Finding My Professional Heart - Natius Oelofsen

      Finding my Professional Heart

      A brief guide to compassionate care and mindfulness for practitioners

      Natius Oelofsen

      eBook ISBN: 9781908625397

      First published in 2016 by Lantern Publishing Ltd

      Lantern Publishing Ltd, The Old Hayloft, Vantage Business Park, Bloxham Rd, Banbury, OX16 9UX, UK

      www.lanternpublishing.com

      © 2016, Natius Oelofsen

      The right of Natius Oelofsen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either written permission from Lantern Publishing Ltd or by a licence permitting restricted copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS, UK.

      www.cla.co.uk

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      The authors and publisher have made every attempt to ensure the content of this book is up to date and accurate. However, healthcare knowledge and information is changing all the time so the reader is advised to double-check any information in this text on drug usage, treatment procedures, the use of equipment, etc. to confirm that it complies with the latest safety recommendations, standards of practice and legislation, as well as local Trust policies and procedures. Students are advised to check with their tutor and/or mentor before carrying out any of the procedures in this textbook.

      Cover design by Andrew Magee Design Ltd

      Contents

      Preface

      I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

      —Maya Angelou

      This little book is written for people who are passionate about health and social care services for vulnerable people. I believe that many of the changes in recent decades in the ways that health and social care services are commissioned, while bringing about efficiencies in the delivery of care, also have unintended consequences. One of the most damaging of these is that we have commodified and codified service delivery to such an extent that we have lost some of the human touch. We seem to have forgotten that care and treatment is fundamentally delivered through human encounters, despite the advanced technologies that may underpin the processes or procedures at hand.

      We can see this in how we teach students competencies and procedures, rather than how to be with people who are vulnerable or in distress. And in the ways in which daily clinical and care practices have been diluted by contracting requirements that lead to practitioners spending disproportionate amounts of their time collecting and capturing data instead of delivering care. Most tragically, some recent reports into failings within health and social care systems, such as the report into Mid Staffordshire hospital in the United Kingdom by Lord Francis, showed just how far things can go wrong when whole care systems become so focused on their performance that they lose sight of their core purpose – delivering care with humanity and compassion.

      In the wake of the Francis report in the NHS, and other, similar reports into failings in our care systems, we have implemented many procedural and regulatory changes. We have introduced inspection regimes and various legal responsibilities that aim to increase accountability and scrutiny. Politicians and heads of governing bodies delivered speeches and wrote lengthy policy documents containing terms such increasing accountability, strengthening governance, and changing cultures. But none of these efforts, however worthy they are, will truly solve the problems we face without a fresh acknowledgement of the human element that permeates all of the work at the front line within health and social care. I am not thinking here about the human factors that play a role when things go wrong, important as those may be, but more about the human factors that colour and shape the encounters between nurses and their patients, support workers and their service users, or social workers and their cases.

      Do we really acknowledge that this work involves more than the nurse taking a measurement or administering an injection? Do we truly understand that he is exposed to a frightened person who might be in pain or in fear of suffering from a serious illness? Do we understand that the support worker not only provides a point of contact with the service, but also functions as a friend and a sounding board in the face of loneliness and despair? In turn, the social worker, while arranging practical support for someone, may also become the focus of their fear of the future – will my child be removed? – or their suffering that might stem from past trauma.

      As these examples illustrate, care and healing involve human encounters. And these encounters have an impact on both service recipients and practitioners. I contend that, when practitioners are faced with others’ trauma, need, and vulnerability, in order to deliver truly effective help that addresses the core issues, it is important that they remain in touch with the humanity of the people they work with – and their own! But this is difficult, as we are social beings and exposure to someone else’s need or vulnerability is likely to sensitise us to our own. This, in turn, can

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