“Are you scared to try something new because if no one likes it, it will be remembered…” An advert aimed at selling chicken-free dippers with an underlying message which is so profound.
Change is hard and uncertain, there is no doubt about this. It’s a complex individual and social movement which requires a collective effort to move the status quo; from a working system which is safe(ish) to a new state which potentially hasn’t been tried and tested before with no guarantees things will be better.There are likely to be many wrong turns along the way and what you set out to do initially, will almost always not work. You can see why things do stay the same way for many years without upheaval.
This is never so true as in the health and social care setting in the UK. In 2023, we are slowly emerging from a global pandemic which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, there are over seven million people on waiting lists for specialist clinical care or surgery, response times for ambulances are double the national standard, workforce shortages are expected to reach over 300,000 in the next decade and the NHS is used as a political football at every possibility. It’s a pretty bleak picture.
Having watched the Barbie movie recently, I feel like we can all relate to ‘Sad Barbie’ – “I’m just going to wait here for things to change”. Where you are so frustrated and you just don’t know why those people who make the decisions don’t just sort it all out and sort it out quick. Sadly, this isn’t how change happens, although it would be nice to think that we can just wait it out until it happens to us. Change begins by accepting that there are some things which are not in our control. However, there is a vast number of things that are within our control and influence, and that change starts from within – by focusing on the things that you can control and making incremental steps towards the goals that you want to achieve.
