A message from our CEO and President - October 2023
Never break the chain of knowledge and experience.
Sometimes it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees particularly when we’re in the midst of such a difficult period of time for the NHS.
Once again, as we write this blog, more strikes are taking place and there is still no sign from the Government that they are prepared to sit down and negotiate.
A stalemate.
But we need to keep going, we need to remind ourselves about what is good about our work and why we do it. We need to retain intensive care staff with many years of knowledge and experience to continue doing what only you can do and remember that what you do makes a difference to our patients and their loved ones. We need to make sure that we never break the chain of our collective knowledge and experience.
When things are going well, we enjoy the teamwork and camaraderie with the people we work with day in day out. But when they’re not going well, the day feels longer and decisions more difficult and work is harder. People often join an organisation with optimism but then some leave but not for career progression. They leave because of a break down in individual relationships or a negative culture.
It’s hard to change a culture and sometimes we just aren’t in a position to affect major change but what we can do is make incremental changes by managing our own reactions and behaviours.
Whilst we may not agree with what is going on around us, we can raise our objections in a respectful way. Everyone has something else going on in their lives besides work and the patient or complex situation in front of them. We all have many layers to our personality and our experiences. Some we reveal to others, some we keep hidden from others, some we aren’t fully aware of ourselves. But, the important thing is to stay true to who we are and do what we believe is right in a respectful way. If we can’t control the situation we’re in, we can focus on controlling our reactions to it by staying true to our values.
Our values as a Society define our culture and are at the very heart of everything we do. They define who we are, what we do and how we do it.
This year, as we launched our new 5 year strategy, we reviewed and re-confirmed our original three core values of: collaboration; freedom of expression; accept and respect; and additionally added a new 4th value of quality. This 1st year of our new strategy has been about going back to basics and strengthening our foundations as a Society. We have been through a growth spurt over the last 6 years as our membership and activities have expanded delivering more impact year on year.
This is thanks to the many members, trustees, Honorary Officers and Presidents giving up their personal time to work collaboratively with our Society’s management and wider staff team. Each of these people are a key link in our chain of knowledge transfer and experience keeping us focused on our goals as a Society. We deliver more together than we could separately.
We rely on the experiences and wisdom of those who have gone before us and often call upon them for a sense check about our current direction. They knew we needed to change and grow as a Society to become more fleet of foot and agile to change and they are key part of the chain of knowledge and experience that keeps our Society thriving.
