Reconnecting with the Heart of Frontline Practice 2022:
‘Connecting and relating in diverse and complex settings’
Date and Time
Tuesday, 24th May 2022
Morning session: 9:30am – 1:00pm
Afternoon session: 2:00pm – 3:45pm
Place: Nano Nagle Place, Cork and online via Zoom
The collaborators behind the Heart of Frontline Practice group – Dr Maeve Hurley, SHEP and Dr Nicola’ O Sullivan, are hosting their third one-day, interactive national seminar for frontline practitioners and managers.
This year’s hybrid seminar takes place in the tranquil surroundings of Nano Nagle Place in Cork. Places are also available online for those who can’t attend in person.
Aware of the ongoing pressures and stress of frontline roles, we invite you to take time out of your routine daily practice to reflect on the impact of your work.
Join us in a safe and facilitated, in-person or online space to pause and engage with topics such as creating a culture of inclusion, communication in professional relationships, and curiosity and compassion.
Through a series of stimulating presentations, interactive plenary sessions and facilitated break-out spaces, this event will focus on enabling practitioners from all disciplines to develop and sustain reflective practice.
We hope that it will help you to reconnect with the heart of your work and what drew you to the work in the first place.
This seminar is one of a series of initiatives by the Heart of Practice collaborative group exploring focused ways of supporting frontline workers.
We look forward to welcoming you to what will be a nourishing and reflective exploration of what is at the heart of frontline practice, while considering the physical, psychological, emotional and relational impacts of frontline work in complex systems.
Speakers:
Joan Fletcher
Independent Social Worker, Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and Trainer
‘From eggshells to allyship: creating a culture of inclusion through courageous, critical conversations about “race”’
Joan Fletcher, MSc Integrative Psychotherapy (Distinction), BA Social Sciences / CQSW, PG Diploma in Education and Training, will explore how we can nurture cultures of inclusion, diversity and equality.
Joan’s social work career spans several years spent working as a mental health social worker, then as a team manager, before moving into social work education. For the past thirty five years, she has worked as a social work lecturer, most recently as Head of Social Work at Goldsmiths, University of London. Throughout her time in higher education, Joan has maintained close links with practice by undertaking training and accreditation as a psychotherapist. She has worked predominantly with health and social care workers, specialising in the areas of promoting diversity, equality and inclusion; cultural competence, identity-based trauma, relationship-based practice, group work with survivors of sexual abuse and reflective supervision. She has researched and published in the areas of, ‘moments of meeting’ in therapeutic encounters, multi-cultural, multi-family group work with teenage parents, diversity and progression in social work and reflective practice. One of the highlights of her career has been Joan’s involvement in steering the DfE funded Practice Supervisor Development Programme (2017-2022).
Dr Tom A. Hutchinson, MB, FRCP(C)
Professor, Department of Medicine and Department of Oncology and Director, McGill Programs in Whole Person Care
‘Communication in professional relationships: insights from the work of Virginia Satir’
Dr Tom Hutchinson will explore the physician/patient (provider/client) relationship and clarify the difference between curing and healing. We will explain congruence and the communication stances and how these ways of communicating relate to whole person care. Participants will then be invited to complete an exercise.
Dr Tom Hutchinson graduated in Medicine from the National University of Ireland with honours in 1971. He trained as an Internist and Nephrologist at McGill University from 1972-1976. From 1976 to 1978 he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale University with Dr Alvan Feinstein. Dr Feinstein led a revolution in medical research that included patients’ subjective experience and reported symptoms as a source of research data. In 1978, Dr Hutchinson returned to McGill where he combined clinical practice of Nephrology and Internal Medicine with research on the clinical determinants of survival in patients with kidney failure. Concern for the lived experience of patients with kidney and other chronic diseases, as well as for their caregivers, led Dr Hutchinson to meet pioneering therapist Virginia Satir in 1986, to complete a four- year training course in Family Therapy at the McGill Institute for Community Psychiatry in 1995 and to publish a book on the stories of kidney patients in 1998.
In 2002, in order to enlarge his focus on the quality of patients’ lived experience, Dr Hutchinson changed his clinical practice to Palliative Medicine and joined Dr Balfour Mount in developing McGill Programs in Whole Person Care. The Programs are aimed at enlarging the Western Health Care mandate from cure and prolongation of life to an equal concern with patients’ quality of life. The Programs seek to study, understand and promote the role of health care in relieving suffering and promoting healing in acute and chronic illness as a complement to the disease focus of biomedicine. Since 2005, the Programs have taught healing in medicine to all medical students throughout all 4 years of the new Physicianship Curriculum at McGill. Dr Hutchinson edited the first academic book on Whole Person Care that was published by Springer in 2011, “Whole Person Care: A New Paradigm for the 21st Century”. In 2012, he was named to the Faculty Honour List for Teaching Excellence at McGill in recognition of “outstanding contributions to education in the Faculty of Medicine”.
Nickie Egan
Principal, North Presentation Primary School, Cork
‘Be curious instead of furious’
A child’s behaviour is a communication of what lies beneath or inside. Everyone has the capacity and ability to show care, compassion and to nurture. Everyone has the ability to be that “One Good Adult”. Everyone can make a difference.
Nickie Egan is Principal of North Presentation Primary School in Cork. She has been in this role for seven years now and 25 years before that as teacher in the same school. Her ambition to be Principal was not to be ‘a Principal’ but to be Principal of the wonderful school she attended herself as a child and had spent her teaching career in. She had always felt and believed it to be a good place with a huge heart and she wanted to be a part of continuing that ethos. Being a teacher in a DEIS school in an area of disadvantage has always been such a rewarding and fulfilling career for her despite the hardships, upset and traumas teachers come across on a daily basis. The school has a strong ethos of care, compassion and nurture. Staff try to approach the teaching and learning from a relational, whole family approach. Always being conscious of where the child and family are in their lives and how it is impacting on their readiness to learn, is something Nickie works at daily and is very proud of.
The hosts for this full-day seminar will be Dr Maeve Hurley, founder of Ag Eisteacht and trainer with Relationships in Practice, Jim Sheehan, director of The Social & Health Education Project (SHEP) and Dr Nicola O’ Sullivan, independent social care consultant.
Fees:
The fee for this one-day seminar is €50