Improving compassionate care skills with education.

The ability to show compassion in practice is a crucial nursing skill. This article discusses how education can change the culture around the delivery of compassionate care. It focuses on using education as a tool and integrating other strategies such as communication, recruitment and leadership, which not only underpin the use of education, but are inextricably linked to bringing about change in the delivery of compassionate care.

Creative writing and dementia care: 'making it real'.

BACKGROUND: Health professionals continue to seek ways to promote positive communication and self-worth when supporting people living with dementia. The value of creative writing techniques as part of reflective practice in nursing and caring for older people with dementia needs further exploration. AIM: To introduce creative writing techniques to health professionals as part of dementia-related reflective practice. METHOD: A local experienced author facilitated creative writing workshops with nine preregistration nursing students (general and mental health), one family carer and five care professionals working with people with dementia. FINDINGS: The student nurses reported that the creative writing exercises felt more 'real' than the reflective practice models they had used in their academic and practical studies. Workshop participants also reported they had learnt some creative writing techniques to reduce work-related stress and anxiety. They also saw the impact of writing activities with people living with dementia, which can enable creativity and 'alleviate the common symptoms of depression and anxiety'. CONCLUSION: Creative writing techniques can support insightful, reflective dementia focused practice. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Creative writing, as a tool in reflective practice, may enable health professionals and family carers to become confident and creative partners in older people's care. The added value, time and investment needed to introduce creative writing need to be articulated and acknowledged from within supervision and staffing teams.

Roles, relationships, perils and values: development of a pathway between practice development and evaluation research.

BACKGROUND: Recent changes in primary care are encapsulated in a drive for enhanced quality, efficiency and effectiveness of care. A key element of the quality agenda is innovation and evaluation. This paper presents a case study of the processes involved in evaluating practice development in primary care, where commissioned research is concomitant to a service development that also integrated its own evaluation. There was an assumption that an 'outside' evaluation would be complementary to the concurrent 'inside' evaluation. However, there is a paucity of literature that overtly discusses or analyses the specific challenges. AIMS: To surface the tensions involved in combining internal and external evaluation, to allow development of a better understanding of the roles, relationships, perils and value of this approach to maintaining and enhancing quality in primary care. DESIGN: A case study presentation of reflexive analysis of inside and outside evaluator experiences of the evaluation of a practice development. RESULTS: We argue that despite recent methodological developments in practice, methodological, methodical, interpretive and political tensions persist between practice development and evaluation. The key problems fuelling the dissonance experienced by both practitioners and researchers appears to be around the co-existence of differing understandings of the evaluation scope and process among stakeholders. This has the potential to jeopardise the coherence of the concurrent external evaluation of a practice development initiative. A pathway enabling the explicit integration of the views of researchers, service developers, commissioners and ethics and research governance boards is presented. CONCLUSION: This article exposes often underlying and unrecognised areas of consonance and dissonance between the views of researchers and practice developers in a context of concurrent practical and academic evaluations. In some cases there is potential to progress from dissonance to consonance. In others, the differing worlds and agendas mean that dissonance will remain, but its existence needs to be acknowledged and worked with, rather than ignored.