Today I talk to Carol Munt, one of the HSJ top 50 ‘patient leaders’ in the country.

I love Carol’s common sense approach to quality improvement in health care. Carol has many different hats, including her own lived experience, looking after her mum with dementia and being a nurse in A&E! I think this episode contains a lot of wisdom, so a great contribution to this podcast series which aims to collect useful insights for Amanda Pritchard, the new CEO of the NHS. A meeting with Carol would be wonderful!

Lots of lemon lightbulbs! 🍋💡🍋See 'chapter headings' for more detail and to pick out your favourite bits, including:

  • See patients as PEOPLE!! Recognise their strengths and help people contribute
  • Don’t write people off, just because they are older!
  • Coproduction is key, otherwise known as working together!
  • Avoid jargon and acronyms. People don’t understand what you’re on about!
  • Our NHS is so valuable, but becoming fragmented and divisive
  • Addressing inequalities is the only way to improve healthcare across the board
  • Fitting around what matters to patients … matters!
  • Too many people are falling through the gaps.
  • Be proud of your improvements and share them, not keep reinventing the wheel
  • Support the best … through a Festival of Ideas!
  • Patients need to be involved, including in the BIG decisions
  • Healthcare professional to patient: it’s very different on the other side of the fence
  • Don’t just listen to ‘people like you’
  • Pirate share the spoils – equally!

Oh, and it's not everyone who writes a poem about me. So thank you for that.

Links and resourcesCarol’s poem about coproduction - and @WhoseShoes! https://twitter.com/muntma/status/1392760141896953856?s=21

Carol is one of the HSJ top 50 Patient Leaders: https://www.hsj.co.uk/supplement-archive/hsj-patient-leaders-2015/5087441.article

Fab NHS stuff : https://fabnhsstuff.net/
Sharing best practice – #VirtualWhoseShoes : https://fabnhsstuff.net/fab-stuff/the-whose-shoes-phenomenon

'10 Leaps' report - Professor Becky Malby:
NHS Coronavirus Report_A4_R6 (lsbu.ac.uk)

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