Schwartz Centre Rounds® aim to explore the human and emotional impact of everyday work by giving healthcare staff the opportunity to come together in a safe but open environment. We evaluated the experience of introducing Schwartz Centre Rounds in a UK hospice over 1-year using a mixed method approach. These rounds were reported as providing staff with a greater appreciation of the interprofessional approach. Individuals were more actively acknowledged by other colleagues as a result of contributions at rounds with an appreciation of a wider team, spanning the whole organisation. This appeared to relieve feelings of isolation and enhance a sense of shared purpose. Some staff chose not to attend but valued their contribution to the organisation without witnessing the emotional impact of hospice work. Our findings indicate that Schwartz Rounds offer staff the environment to explore the human element of their work and appear to improve interprofessional working.

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styles grieved more (p < 0.003) and felt it was wrong to sell the old hospice (p < 0.05). Both anxious and avoidant staff with higher scores were less likely to want to move (p < 0.05). Conclusions and Applications to Hospice practice Our data suggest that attachment style is stable despite the stress of working in a hospice environment. As in other workplaces anxiously attached personnel have predictably more negative emotional responses to life events. This is useful information for staff care and suggests some groups of staff may benefit from targeted clinical supervision during periods of great change.

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Focus of the studyThe study was informed by a literature review that identified similarities between the characteristic values and skills of social workers and some recent descriptions of close ‘charismatic’ or ‘transformational’ leadership, especially an account of the role of the leader as ‘servant and partner’.MethodologyThe method adopted was to undertake a qualitative study of palliative care social work in a hospice in the south of England. Specialist palliative care social work was selected as a likely source of examples of social work practice ‘at its best.’ The main fieldwork activities undertaken were semi-structured interviews with social workers and other members of the hospice's multi-disciplinary team, followed by a final workshop session.FindingsThe study showed that social work practice in this setting was driven by an attitude of profound respect and sustained availability, which included a commitment to ‘being with’ people in circumstances of intractable suffering. Specific mechanisms were identified through which social workers used professional skills such as adaptive communication, sensitive risk management, systemic thinking and improvisation, to enable service users to identify and express their priority needs, to mobilise their own distinctive abilities and strengths, and to optimise their use of informal support networks. By making these insights accessible to the multi-disciplinary team, social workers promoted the ability of service users to function as effective co-experts within the distributed leadership dynamic of the multi-disciplinary team.PresentationThe presentation provides a detailed analysis of the processes through which social workers supported service users to discover and exercise their own capacity to be ‘leaders in our own lives’; and how this contributes a to a more practical understanding of what is involved in ‘servant and partner’ leadership.