“Hello, my name is Lydia Hartland—Rowe, on Friday November 27th. I just want to take a minute to say something about what is happening on the website and what we are hearing about and thinking about in relation to health and social care staff in North Central London Integrated Care System.

For the next couple of weeks we are highlighting some of the podcasts that have been up for a while, because we think they make a lot of sense at the moment too. Today’s podcast focusses on what is needed from an organisational perspective in the context of exposure to events and experiences that have the potential to cause, or re-activate traumatic responses. So this is really about a healthy enough organisation, one that can keep moving and living while being alert to the pressures and conflicts that if they remain hidden from view, can get in the way of collaboration at best, and can leave people feeling unheard, isolated and uncared-for at worst.

It feels very timely, when we are all facing experiences at the moment when some of our bigger social systems seem to be swayed by influences that aren’t about the best of what we can do and be, when panic and reactivity seem to pop up just when we thought we were thinking carefully, and when leadership constantly has to face the pain of asking others to manage experiences that they know will be hard to bear, and remain authentic in the process – and for those of us being asked to follow needing to work hard to use our emotional imagination to try and see what how hard that too might be.

The podcast we are putting up helps to think about why some of the things that feel so difficult hit us in the ways they do in organisational life, and also has some apparently simply ways of doing things that can really help to limit the amount of distress we inadvertently cause each other, and in that way help us to continue to draw on the best of ourselves in the interests of our shared work to care for others. We hope that you find it helpful.”