Humanising Care Fellowships
The Humanising Care Fellowships came to end in March-April 2025, bringing to a close three varied and exciting pieces of work. In May, the Fellows met with the Point of Care Foundation team to talk about the work they had done, their experiences of the Fellowship, and what they have learned.
The three Fellows appointed – GP Alison Convey, speech and language therapist Sinead Rothrie, and Juliet Rayment, a researcher working with a regulator – represent very different parts of the health and care system. But within each part of the system, their work has emphasised the value of human engagement.
We are grateful to the bequest left to us by Drusilla Harvey, which made this work possible. We have learned a great deal from the Humanising Care Fellows, and have enjoyed welcoming the Fellows into the Point of Care Foundation team.
Each Fellowship was a unique story but, reflecting on the work as a whole, some themes emerge:
- The value of a cohort approach. All three Fellows remarked upon the value of the action learning set they created together, and the support they gave each other during the Fellowships, alongside the work undertaken with the Point of Care Foundation team.
- The Fellowship model provided freedom to try things out and fail. Without employing a tight reporting framework for this work, but with close support from our team and each other, Fellows felt they had the space they needed to take their work where it needed to go. In some cases this meant rethinking how best to approach the work, and deviating from the original plans.
- A major theme of the all the work has been the importance of connectivity – with each other, and within parts of the health and care system where they are working. This has been an enabler for many of the impacts we have seen from this work, and underlines the importance of human relations as the basis for this work.
We have been pleased to see a wide range of outcomes and impacts from the work. Importantly, the Fellowships have laid the groundwork for further projects, with ideas being taken forward not only by Sinead, Juliet and Alison, but by others who have been involved in their work. This is an important human legacy of the work.
Find out more about each Fellow’s work: