Patient care relies on the compassion of the staff who are drawn to the profession of caring — and on their level of support, mentoring, leadership, and the environment in which they interact with patients, visitors, and each other.
Good NHS conflict resolution training will always underline the value-base of the staff engaged in healthcare services, so that their actions can be aligned with their beliefs, values, and ethics.
Fred Lee, author of If Disney Ran Your Hospital, captured exactly what we’re aiming for when we train healthcare staff in conflict resolution:
“The first level of care is competence. We hire healthcare personnel for their competence. We continually develop their competence on the job as they learn to use new equipment and adapt to new protocols in medicine. Competence is the level at which clinical staff is hired and fired.”
“Our next level of care is courtesy. Courtesy is not usually in our criteria for hiring, but if the organization begins to focus on customer needs and wants, courtesy quickly becomes something that is required. We stress it in orientation. We call it service excellence. We write scripts to standardize courteous behaviours. These behaviours become part of our job descriptions and performance reviews. We might not fire anybody who lacks skills in courtesy, as we would with clinical incompetencies, but we do try to make it something that is required. And repeated examples of outright rudeness can be grounds for dismissal.”
“Finally there is the emotional level of caring. It is clearly beyond ordinary courtesy. Let’s call it compassion. It is not something we hire for. It is not something that can be required. We don’t fire people who don’t know how to express it. It appears to be an action that springs spontaneously from a person who is ‘inspired.’”
📊 The care ladder: Competence gets you hired. Courtesy keeps patients satisfied. But compassion — spontaneous, unexpected, memorable — is what makes a stay unforgettable.
Lee makes a crucial distinction that every healthcare leader should absorb:
It isn’t meeting patients’ expectations that makes a stay unique or special. It is the spontaneous, unexpected, memorable moments that generate feelings of loyalty. More often than not, it is the compassionate connection between a caregiver and a patient that elevates common courtesy into something more tender and unforgettable than good, routine care.
That’s the standard good conflict resolution training should aim for — not just de-escalation techniques, but creating the conditions where compassionate care can flourish even under pressure.
Gerard O’Dea provides tailored PMVA and Conflict Resolution training courses for healthcare and hospital service providers around the UK, so that patients and staff are treated with dignity and shown respect — even in their most difficult moments.
Combining respectful verbalisation skills with last-resort physical alternatives for true, full-spectrum patient care has been his specialty for over ten years as director of training for Dynamis.
💡 Key takeaway: When conflict resolution training connects back to the caregiver’s core values — competence, courtesy, and compassion — it stops being a box-ticking exercise and becomes something staff carry with them into every patient interaction.
Learn more about Dynamis Conflict Resolution Training →
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