The cultivating compassion project set out to represent and celebrate
compassionate practice within local NHS Trusts by creating compassion digital
stories for educational purposes. A key project aim was to capture and build on
existing practice in order to develop compassionate culture within the
organization. The project took an appreciative inquiry approach, which considers
that the creative process of storytelling can facilitate a ‘collective imagination’
that can become constructive in making possible change and improvement within
and for the organization. Six stories from three separate NHS trusts were created
for the toolkit and have successfully been used to raise awareness of compassion.
However, these stories are very different from other digital stories. This paper
asks why? It explores the impact on the choice of story, the narration of the story
and the images used when the stories are specifically created for educational
purposes and are considered to represent examples of compassionate care for
professional practice development.
The paper suggests that the authentic voice can be lost when stories become
incorporated into the organizational discourse. Thus, rather than the stories
enabling a ‘collective imagination’ they can become representative of prescribed
organizational norms. However, the paper argues that despite this, the value of
the stories in facilitating discussing and learning remains because within the
organizational context when these prescribed norms are brought to life through
the medium of the digital stories, they can be challenged.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
