The Kindness Audit

The Edith Ellen Foundation recognised that one of the biggest challenges faced by both nursing and caring services today is to bring about cultural changes to attitudes and to have the right staff doing the right job in the right way.

Many opportunities are lost that would make substantial changes to benefit people

-the Key elements missing

– The capacity to listen and to understand what people at the front line are really saying

The Foundation’s Kindness Audit, is an innovated National Standard which defines the quality of care across all holistic integrated care.

This will increase the expectations of care delivery and will lead to the creation of greater choice, and act as a guide for people and families to be able to decide the level of services required for their own individual needs, and for those of their families.

The Edith Ellen Foundation’s approach to supporting service providers, together with all individuals receiving nursing and care and their families, promotes the effective use of sharing best practices, information, community engagement networks and bridging gaps in integrated care systems.

This approach is the motivation to inspire and develop consistency, transparency, responsibility and accountability for ideal models of a Holistic Kindness in Care culture and ensure equal relationships between those that are receiving and delivering health and social services across the UK.

The Edith Ellen Foundation set about producing a very simple, but methodical, principle and to inspire a new cornerstone for education, assessment, training, support, and recognition of shared best practices.

One that any leadership management, in health and social care, from any care manager, sister, nurse, care worker, or carer at home will ever want to receive, to help them improve the care that they themselves want to format and deliver.

Quite simply it is putting Kindness at the front of all nursing and care; it will give us all control and choices, and equally important, it gives everyone one of us, ownership of our own care for now, and for the future to come. It is returning pride in a career of caring for others.

The Foundation has developed a UK Kindness Audit to provide a thoughtful self-evaluation and mirror image against all nursing and care, to support, connect, confirm and improve the standard of uniformity of those services.

It allows management and staff to empathetically reflect on the provision of their services and to ask:

• Is this truly good enough?

• Are we all working together in unison?

• Do we always ensure people, not routines, are put at the front of all nursing and care?

• Do we do it every day?

• Do we really listen and hear our people’s voices?