Yesterday marked ten years since the death of Dr Kate Granger. If the name isn’t familiar, her NHS campaign likely is. Kate was a young doctor being treated for terminal cancer. Lying in a hospital bed in 2013, seriously ill with post-operative sepsis, she noticed something that troubled her: many of the people caring for her never told her who they were. Blood was taken, observations were done, difficult news was delivered – often by people who hadn’t introduced themselves. She was, in her own words, left feeling like “a diseased body and not a real person”.
Kate and her husband Chris started a campaign. #hellomynameis asked something embarrassingly simple of health and care professionals: introduce yourself properly, every time. By the time Kate died, on 23 July 2016 at the age of 34, more than 400,000 professionals across over 90 organisations had made the pledge, and the campaign has since reached billions of people worldwide. NHS England created the Kate Granger Awards for Compassionate Care in her honour, and they’re still awarded today.
What this means in social work
Kate’s campaign is remembered as being about names. But her formula has two halves – who I am, and why I’m here. Research from CASCADE suggests it’s the second half where social work most often falls down.
An introduction, Kate argued, is “the first rung on the ladder to providing truly person-centred, compassionate care”. It’s the moment a professional acknowledges the power imbalance in the room and makes the first move toward a human relationship: here is who I am, and here is why I’m here.
A social worker arriving at a family’s home for the first time is unfamiliar, but they might also be feared. The professional at the door holds knowledge and authority the family does not. Whether that person on the doorstep can say clearly who they are, what their role is, and what will happen next matters.
Work by Donald Forrester, David Westlake and Charlotte Whittaker, based on recordings of real conversations between social workers and families, has looked closely at what they call purposefulness: whether the worker is clear about why they’re there, what the concerns are, and what needs to be different.
In a study of 127 families, purposefulness – together with clarity about concerns and keeping the child in focus – formed a skill the researchers call “good authority”: the sensitive but honest use of the power a social worker holds. Relationship-building skills like empathy and warmth predicted how engaged parents felt. But in longer-term work, it was good authority that better predicted whether family life actually improved.
Agenda setting – an idea these researchers draw from motivational interviewing – matters because it gives the conversation a shared, spoken purpose: here is why I’ve come, here is what we need to talk about, what would you like to make sure we cover? That’s why Kate Granger’s campaign is such a fitting story for Good Care Month. #hellomynameis reminds us that good care and good social work both start with the basics.