The power of small gestures - Graham Lamb

Graham Lamb, Cook Team Manager at The Christie

Graham Lamb

Small gestures can make a big difference - a simple smile and a thank you go a long way. As a member of the catering team at The Christie, we know this only too well, and will always go the extra mile to help our patients. 

What we do is a very important part of the patient experience, but working in a place where everyone has been touched by cancer can be even more rewarding.

That’s one of the reasons why The Christie has set up a serious of monthly meetings for its staff to discuss their feelings and to share their experiences. These meetings are called Schwartz Rounds and I was delighted to have been asked to give a presentation at one recently. The theme of the discussion was the ‘The Power of Small Gestures’. 

At first I struggled to think about what I should speak about. But then I started to think about what we in the catering department actually do on a day-to-day basis and how our department makes a difference to patients, visitors and staff. We do some pretty impressive things and we also understand the power of small gestures.

Every day we come to work and do our jobs but never take the time to appreciate how much hard work, care and dedication we put in, and it is only by reflecting on and talking about it through the Schwartz Rounds that we have the chance to stop and do that, which is quite an eye opening thing to do, and is also very cathartic.

Most people don’t realise how often we are asked to visit patients on the wards when they have specific dietary requirements, or because their treatments or personal preferences mean they can’t always find meals to suit their palate. We often tailor menus to suit individual patients and revisit them every couple of days to plan the meals for the following period. Simply by doing this we find patients are more open to discussing their meals and in some cases, when their preferences may seem a little strange, they feel more comfortable  speaking to us rather than the ward staff because often they haven’t considered the possibility that we can provide alternative choices outside of the standard menu.

Through visiting a ward we get to see a patient over a period of time. It’s very rewarding to see a noticeable improvement in a patient , especially those who are eating properly again through our input. The flip side of this is that it can be very upsetting in a small number of cases to see a patient continue to deteriorate, despite the best efforts of all the doctors and nurses, and of course our own team that works so hard to find choices of food that the patient will want to eat.

Simply by discussing and planning their meals with us, patients feel included and empowered and are more inclined to try and eat their meal because they have had an input into it. 

Through communicating, encouraging and involving the patients we know that we go the extra mile to offer the best service. It is always appreciated by the patients and when they say “thank you”, that gesture always makes what we do worthwhile, no matter how tiring the day has been, we focus on that gesture.

One example of how the catering team has gone the extra mile for patients was when a very poorly patient in the last days of life wanted to get married. We got a call at 11am that morning to say the wedding was taking place at lunchtime and could we provide a wedding buffet, including a wedding cake, to be served at 1pm. How could we refuse a request like that! 

So we pulled together as a team with all the usual mayhem going on around us and managed to deliver a wedding buffet as well as a cake with chocolate balloons, hearts and the couples’ names iced onto the cake. 

Knowing that we had done something so special for someone in their dying days was hugely rewarding and we know that most patients really appreciate that. It’s equally rewarding when the efforts we go to are recognised by our colleagues with a simple thank you – the power of small gestures really can make a big difference, but are all too easily overlooked!

Most people only see the ward service or the restaurant service and don’t appreciate what goes on behind the scenes to ensure those services are delivered on time. For example we serve around 1,500 meals per day to patients and staff, all freshly prepared and cooked on the premises. No microwave meals like a lot of hospitals serve to patients! It’s essential that we send the patient trolleys out to the wards on time and ensure the restaurant service is set up and ready to go each day. We often have buffets to do for meetings and the odd wedding breakfast to provide as well, so team work is essential.

So our days can be interspersed with ups and downs, positive and negative gestures, however, as always, a positive gesture from a patient cancels out anything negative about the day, making our jobs even more worthwhile, and giving us a great deal of job satisfaction. Working at The Christie and helping our patients really is a special experience. 

The Christie is like a jigsaw and we all make up that jigsaw, no matter what job we do. We all form part of that jigsaw and if any piece is missing, the jigsaw can never be completed. Each piece of the jigsaw is also like one of those small gestures, and without the thousands of small gestures everyday, our Christie jigsaw would be incomplete!