Scottish Ambulance Service – embedding kindness into our service

Pauline Howie, Chief Executive at SAS shares their journey of embedding kindness following engagement with Carer Voices

This is an excerpt from the latest Carer Voices publication ‘Effecting Change’, evidencing culture change in compassionate care across Scotland.

The Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) is extremely proud of our people.  Every single day we witness acts of kindness, compassion and selflessness from both our front-line clinical teams and also our support staff. Our people are firmly at the heart of who we are, and we value immensely the service that they deliver in often difficult and extremely challenging circumstances.

It is perhaps the word ‘service’ that resonates with our people the most. ‘Service’ is often considered to be putting the needs of others before ourselves. Within SAS this means working with our partners to deliver sustainable and effective care, experience and treatment to serve the people of Scotland. Our vision of quality service drives everything that we do, and we recognise the extraordinary lengths that our people go to in the service that they provide.

We also recognise, though, that delivering a service can bring individual pressures for our people by placing demands on their physical and mental wellbeing. Through our health and wellbeing strategy we are committed to promoting a healthy mind, body and lifestyle together with an environment that our people consider to be a great place to work. This means that we want to provide a culture of care and compassion where our people feel both valued and supported.

The chance to work alongside the ALLIANCE in supporting this vision was an opportunity founded in shared values and a common a commitment to those who are involved in delivering health and social care. Cultural growth occurs best where our workplace behaviour aligns unequivocally with our workplace values. Themes such as Intelligent Kindness and Civility Saves Lives provide the fundamental building blocks of this alignment, promoting psychological safety and ultimately improving the wellbeing of everyone that we interact with.

One of the key enablers to this has been the engaging delivery of a number of keynote sessions from Tommy Whitelaw, ALLIANCE National Lead for Caring and Outreach. Establishing peak rapport from the offset, he has used his presentations to vocalise not only why kindness in the workplace is important, but also how we can best put good intentions into practice. His understanding of the importance of human needs has resonated with our people: when we listen with attentiveness, we become emotionally supportive as a workforce, building trust, kindness and better outcomes. Having conversations around what matters to those around us drives inclusivity and fosters camaraderie and teamwork. By design, these are key outcomes that are embedded in our recently launched foundation leadership and management development programme for our first-level managers.

By entrenching the principles that Tommy addresses we are seeking to develop leaders who are both compassionate and people focused. Our culture is very much dependant on the ethos and emotional intelligence of our people. In Tommy’s words we believe that they are ‘spectacular’ and that ‘they matter!’ We very much want the messages that Tommy champions to remain at the forefront of our culture for all existing and future generations of our people.

Having already delivered to our trainee technician courses, Tommy has left a positive and long-lasting impression. With additional sessions scheduled for our MSc Paramedic Science students and also to our wider workforce, the feelings of optimism over future wellbeing culture are already palpable. To achieve our ambition of a sustainable healthy culture takes regular emotional investment from our leaders, clinicians, support staff and people that we interact with daily. We’re immensely proud to have Tommy and the ALLIANCE as part of this journey and we wholeheartedly embrace our future work together.

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