Cardiff and Vale Kindness month

on 09 December 2020 RCM Branches

Cara Moore, RCM member in Cardiff & Vale UHB dedicated November as Kindness month for staff in her local  maternity unit. Here is what she has to say;

After the first wave of Covid-19 I noticed there was morale low amongst staff and people were extremely burnt out. I’m aware how this can impact the service and the care we give our women and their families and so I decided to launch an initiative to focus on self kindness and self care as well as promoting the power of kindness in healthcare across obs and gynae. I came across Civility Saves Lives and a TED talk by the founder Dr Chris Turner and it really resonated with me. We must be civil and kind to one another in order to improve patient safety! The 13th of November is World Kindness Day so I thought I would use November as a whole month to promote kindness. I created a 30 day Kindness Challenge which I used Facebook to provide daily updates. I created a different challenge for each day as well as providing the evidence as to why each act of kindness would benefit us. I used these challenges to signpost staff to wellbeing resources such as Keep Well NHS and Headspace. I contacted John Lewis and Paula’s Choice who generously donated a huge amount of gifts that I could give out to people who had been nominated by their colleagues for a token of appreciation or Random Act of Kindness. I had seen how well this had been received when the RCM local branch had done the same thing. I organised a Resilience and Wellbeing day held by one of our consultant anesthetists whereby he taught staff the ways in which we can improve our resilience and manage our stresses. That session was so successful. We then had a yoga session with Nicola one of our lovely midwives. It was so lovely to see everyone winding down and relaxing and the staff loved it. I was then asked to deliver a presentation to the 1st year students at Cardiff University. It was great to see such enthusiastic faces and to welcome the next generation of midwives but to remind them that we must be kind to ourselves, look after each other and always lead with kindness and civility.
Although November is over The Kindness Project will continue. I have many ideas for 2021 and ways to boost staff morale and ensure kindness always wins!