Editor’s Note: This article was originally written and shared with us by Nick Leon of Naked Eye, and is shared here with gratitude. To see the article in its original format on LinkedIn, please click here.
“I’m a doctor, but also a terminally ill cancer patient. During a hospital stay in August 2013 with post-operative sepsis, I made the stark observation that many staff looking after me did not introduce themselves before delivering my care. It felt incredibly wrong that such a basic step in communication was missing”.
Those were the words of Dr. Kate Granger, a young NHS geriatrician who had a terminal cancer diagnosis. What she learnt seeing things from a patient perspective was how it felt to be treated as a condition rather than a person.
Doctor after doctor came to her bed without introducing themselves. The physician who told her cancer had spread didn’t make eye contact. She described feeling like “just a diseased body in a hospital bed” rather than a human being.
“Hello, my name is”.
Those were four words a porter said when he was wheeling her to the operating theatre and are now considered the foundational step of patient-centred care in the UK and beyond.
In 2013, Kate launched #hellomynameis on Twitter with the support and encouragement of her husband Chris Pointon. The premise was almost embarrassingly simple: ask every healthcare worker to introduce themselves before treating a patient. See the person, not the diagnosis. Build trust through the most basic act of human acknowledgment.
It became one of the most significant campaigns in NHS history.
Over 100 trusts backed it, hospitals redesigned their name badges and it was embedded into staff training. The Chief Nursing Officer and the Health Secretary gave it their full support as did 400,000 NHS staff. Today over twenty countries have adopted its framework.
Kate died in 2016 at the age of 34.
One observation turned into 400,000 pledges.
The specific detail that changes everything is almost never the one anyone was looking for.
If you have a patient-centred care story that has made a difference, large or small, I’d love to hear it.
