SPECIAL SESSION: Leadership and Person-Centredness: Time for Change!

Description/Overview: In the past 10-15 years, healthcare services (particularly in the UK) have been rocked by various ‘scandals’ that have largely focused on a lack of dignified, compassionate, respectful and indeed unsafe practices from practitioners (of many disciplines). The outcome in most of these has been the loss of many lives, particularly vulnerable children, older people and people with disabilities (such as intellectual disability). Whilst nothing about the exposed practices can be condoned in any way, the reports clearly demonstrate the importance of a person-centred culture, i.e. a culture that treats all stakeholders as persons and one in which the values of personhood are lived out in all parts and at all levels of an organisation. However the reality is that despite the rhetoric of person-centredness, such cultures are not dominant in healthcare settings and for most people (staff and patients) they experience ‘person-centred moments’ at most . Research by McCance et al shows through narrative analysis that patients and staff recognise these moments of person-centredness but also recognise that in between these moments there are long periods/gaps where person-centredness is not the dominant way of being. Indeed, many care environments are ‘psychologically unsafe’ and that this issue needs to be addressed if a person-centred approach to practice is to be realised. One characteristic of a person-centred workplace culture is situational leadership. However, for leaders to enable such a culture, they need to be able to flourish in their role. The expectations on leaders to be the holders of the space in which effectiveness of services happens is enormous. But within these expectations, how do we help nurse leaders to flourish as persons? In this presentation I will address this issue and propose that we need to rethink the role of leaders and ensure that they have the necessary conditions for their own flourishing.