The Enhancing Dignity through Caring Conversations project took place across ten months in Carnbroe Care Home in North Lanarkshire, and involved staff, residents and families. The key aim of the project was to develop excellent human interaction promoting dignity; utilising the seven C’s of caring conversations: be courageous, connect emotionally, be curious, consider other perspectives, collaborate, compromise and celebrate.
The project used a number of methods including observation and stories to try to capture interactions that worked well (appreciative approach) to promote a sense of dignity for residents, families and staff. These were fed back to people and we explored with them how we could help these excellent interactions happen more of the time.
This approach led to enhanced interactions in the care home with people particularly noticing the language they used and how they learnt about other people perspectives and what mattered to them living, visiting or working in the care home.
The development of practice was enabled by the use of the appreciative inquiry approach. To learn more about this approach to enhancing caring conversations in the workplace take a look at the resource that has been developed at My Home Life.
Belinda Dewar and Tamsin MacBride worked with staff in a care home and wrote a poem using the words of the participants in the Caring Conversations project. It is a poem about developing interactions in a way that values people.
Belinda read it at the end of their presentation to the QNIS Conference in March 2014. It had a powerful effect on everyone there.