In this episode, Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a practicing GP in East London, talks about the twin crises facing general practice - Covid and workload - and the challenges they pose for humanised care.

Bev Fitzsimons speaks to Ceinwen Giles about Shine Cancer Support, a charity working to support people in their 20s, 30s and 40s with a cancer diagnosis, which she established after going through cancer treatment herself. She reflects on some of the issues faced by young adults living with cancer, and the unique challenges of providing support services through the pandemic. 

In our second podcast series we want to share some of the reality of working in healthcare from different perspectives across the NHS and social care. These 'voices from the point of care' are an important counterbalance to media portrayals of healthcare staff as heroes or villains, because In reality we are all just humans who have good days and bad days.

In this episode Bev Fitzsimons speaks to Lisa Cooper, director of community and mental health services at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, about life as a senior leader in the NHS.

In the final episode of this first series of podcasts, Bev Fitzsimons discusses humanised healthcare in mental health services with Bev (Bhairavi) Sapre, Consultant Psychiatrist at Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Bev brings a range of perspectives from her psychiatry career: she works in the perinatal service at Cheshire and Wirral, but combines this with long-standing service as an army reservist. She has worked as a psychiatrist for the military and, as a visiting professor at the University of Cheshire, she conducts research into the wellbeing of veterans. Bev and Bev talk about how patients' perspectives can be brought to bear on services supporting mental health and women's experience of pregnancy and birth - two areas of healthcare with a strong record of service user involvement.

Bev Fitzsimons asks what humanised healthcare looks like for people with long-term health conditions. She meets three women whose long-term conditions mean they have needed to engage regularly with the system over an extended period. They share their experiences of long-term treatments (for sickle cell disease for two guests, and a long-term mental health condition for the other), and give their perspectives of the way the NHS works for them.

In this episode Bev Fitzsimons is joined by Howard Cohen and Sean Sweeney, neonatologists at the Randall Children's Hospital in Portland, Oregon. They share their experiences of life in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and the 'emotional labour' of their work with families whose experiences are often highly traumatic. The Randall Hospital is part of the Vermont Oxford Network (VON) of neonatal units around the world. The Point of Care Foundation has worked with VON to introduce Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) techniques, enabling clinicians to learn from families about improvements in their care. Howard Cohen, with clinicians and parents from the Portland Providence Hospital, are due to publish an article in the British Medical Journal about their experience of using EBCD and what they have learned. 

This episode features Hayley Hughes, Associate Director of Patient-Centred Care at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, who speaks with Point of Care Foundation founder Jocelyn Cornwell about her experiences as Head of Compassionate Care at the Bristol Nightingale Hospital, created in 2020. What can we learn from her experience of thinking about humanised care in what was set to be a centre for the mass treatment of Covid - potentially one of the most inhuman care settings imaginable? 

This episode looks at humanised care in the context of death and dying. Bev Fitzsimons is joined by Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now Point of Care Foundation chair,  and Libby Sallnow, a palliative care medical consultant at the Central North West London NHS Trust and lecturer at UCL and St Christopher's hospice. Both were members of the Lancet Commission on the value of death. 

In the first of our new podcast series, Bev Fitzsimons speaks to Point of Care Foundation founder Jocelyn Cornwell about what humanising healthcare means, and her work in pursuit of this goal.