TedX: Talks. Yvonne Sawbridge: Why might good people deliver bad care? (26 May 2015)

Summary

At this TedX event, Yvonne Sawbridge says that caring professionals offer hard, emotional work. In the same way in which physical labour is recognised and accounted for in management practice, emotional labour needs to be recognised as a role requirement for nurses and other caring professions. All of us have an emotional bank account that is depleted by everything we see and do, and people working in caring professions need support to top this account back up.

Yvonne Sawbridge joined the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham as a Senior Fellow in 2011 and previously worked in the NHS in a variety of posts since qualifying as a nurse and health visitor in the 1980’s. She spent 10 years as a Director of Nursing in a number of PCTs including South Staffs PCT which commissioned from Mid Staffs Hospital, at the time of a public inquiry into failings in the provision of care.