“People die twice”

We love delivering training courses here at Nurture Development, and what we have found leads to deeper and longer-term community centred change is to follow on from the training with ongoing mentoring and companionship, where we walk alongside practitioners as they deepen their ABCD practice.
 
One such organization with whom we’ve had that training, and then a mentoring relationship, is Strathcarron Hospice, Scotland. Over the last two years, we’ve had the privilege of supporting them in sprinkling ABCD practices and principles into how they support folks to live good and interdependent lives right up to the end. This week the practitioners who have been advancing an asset-based community development approach to end of life in local communities in Strathcarron share their learning with colleagues from across the UK at the UK annual Hospice Conference. You can read an outline of the Strathcarron ABCD journey by clicking here.
 
The CEO of Strathcarron Hospice once explained to me why she is so passionate about this way of working by saying:
“people die twice, first socially, then clinically, we need to do more about the first”.
 
I am delighted that Hospice UK are recognizing and honouring the efforts of Strathcarron Hospice by opening space for them to share their learning through a workshop at this year’s conference. I also want to recognize the stewardship of Hospice UK, because it was as a result of an ABCD training workshop which they commissioned Nurture Development to deliver to interested UK Hospices three years ago that this doorway of possibility opened. Two of the people who attended the ABCD workshop that I delivered and then stepped through this door of possibility were Susan High and Hannah Gray from Strathcarron Hospice. Three years on, they are sharing their own ABCD poster on an important national platform, and sharing proof of the powerful impact of an ABCD way of working.
 
I wish them a fruitful conversation with their colleagues; I suspect they are at the vanguard of a growing movement towards an even more community-centred hospice movement in the UK. I know that there are many other Hospices on a similar journey, and to them we say: Onwards!
 
Cormac Russell
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