Hard work should be fun!

It is a while since I have written my blog…. I guess life got in the way.. two of my daughter had babies so I have been juggling work with grandparent fun stuff and some things have to slip… anyway.. as I have driven round the country I had had many potential blogs running around my brain..
Every day as I listen to Radio 4 Today programme on my way to work I hear the endless drip of negative NHS stories, we seem as a nation intent on always believing the worst. It makes me sad. For those of us working in the service working really hard to make it better but believing we already deliver a service that is good for most, excellent for some but we know it is poor for some too .. and no room for complacency and so many challenges ahead. But all the negative makes it hard to feel good about what we do every day when we come to work. It weighs you down. My daughters had a patchwork of experiences.. some good.. some excellent some only average.. mostly dependant on the individuals they came across. So much of what influences patient experience is the attitude of the individuals who deliver the service..and what mattered to them was being involved in decisions, treated like a person not a walking womb, given time, looked at and acknowledged. Simple stuff. But that simple stuff happens when the organisation allows individuals who work there to flourish and enjoy their work. To feel valued and important. When you feel valued it is easy to help others to feel like that too. It is infectious!
At a time of such threat and challenge in the system it is more important than it ever has been that those who work in the NHS feels valued and can feel good about coming to work. WE talk about fun. Is it fun to be at work? If I hear laughter in my organisation I feel we are on track. Yes we are busy and we do a lot every day.. but we can also be relaxed enough with each other to laugh at lunch times, which we have together in the kitchen and even at the meetings where important work is done too.
We have developed a game to play with our stakeholders and the public called “Strictly Come Commissioning”. It is a board game played by a group of people playing at being commissioners for a day We piloted it our recent Health Watch conference and it went really well. It stimulated lots of conversation and debate about all sorts of issues. There was a real buzz in the room. Should we commission services for people who smoke/are overweight/ subfertile? How do those services stack up against services for people with cancer or autism? What do you do when urgent admissions spiral out of control? We did get a letter for someone who got the invite but didn’t attend saying we shouldn’t be playing a game about serious things.. but we learn through play and it was fun. Is that wrong? When did work become something that had to be serious all the time? Surely that isn’t a natural way to be? We are now thinking we could use the game to explain commissioning to all sorts of groups: GP trainee doctors, A level students, patient groups, surely better than me standing there with a powerpoint?
So whilst we are all working so hard changing so much, working under such pressure, lets remember also to have moments of lightness and fun too. It helps teams to value each other and work better together and it doesn’t reflect any lack of commitment to the job. I read somewhere that adults laugh an average of 9 times a day compared to children who laugh 40-50 times a day. So here’s to hard work and laughter.