Early in July, I took three planes and travelled a total of 24 hours to get to the Mount Gambier site at Limestone Coast Local Health Network in South Australia.
There I was met at the airport by CEO Emma Poland. She took me for a tour of the town and out for dinner with her team before I settled into a local hotel to get ready for a full day of Humanity in Healthcare talks, a panel and a workshop.
What does Australia's health system have in common with Canada's? It turns out even with different funding models and 13,480 kilometres away from each other, we have much more in common than we do differences.
No matter where you are in the world, folks who work in health care want to have the time and the space to fully and completely care for people. When they are rushed or pushed to be 'efficient', it causes great moral distress.
People who are patients (or consumers as they are called in Australia) want to be seen as humans first, to be listened to and to be heard. This is universal.
One audience member brilliantly said, "We must listen to the spaces between the words." A physician came up to me between sessions and talked about the concept of "beautiful listening." Another wise clinician discussed the need to both idealistic and pragmatic. There was an emphasis from an Indigenous leader on making sure people feel safe. The consumer engagement group spoke about working to avoid the "tick-box" mentality. We talked a lot about how to make sure, as one participant said, "the joy didn't get lost in the day."
I learned in South Australia that people are people wherever you go. That we must carve out gentle spaces for people to be curious, to have conversations so they can understand each other better. And mostly, as Raymond Carver said in his poem Late Fragment, we all need to call ourselves beloved, to feel ourselves beloved on this Earth.
What's going to save health care? It is us uniting in our shared humanity. Thank you Emma and her prep team - Lindy, Angela and Barb - for partnering with me, a patient, a layperson from Canada, to carve out this special time to talk about what really matters in health care with your staff and consumers. Don't stop. You are on the right track. Keep going. xo.
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