Doctor Catherine Crock AM
Safer patients lead to safer staff, and vice versa, says globally recognised leader in the development and implementation of patient-centred care, Doctor Catherine Crock AM – who will be presenting at the ANMF (Vic Branch) OHS Conference: March to Safety on Friday 27 March 2026.
Founder of the Hush Foundation and Gathering of Kindness, Dr Crock has worked at the Royal Children’s Hospital since 1994. It was here, doing bone marrow tests and lumbar punctures on children with leukaemia, that she first became interested in kindness in healthcare.
‘I was pretty concerned about what the children and their families were going through,’ she says, ‘especially with the stress and anxiety involved in the procedures they were having.’
In what was at the time considered a somewhat radical move, Dr Crock sat down with families and asked them their thoughts.
‘We can learn a lot just by listening,’ she says. ‘I asked them what they know about the system that we didn’t, and what we could do better if we did it with them.’
The parents had some ‘brilliant, practical ideas’, she says. If they had to wait, for example, they asked why we couldn’t give them a pager so they could go and wait in the park with their child? Or if that wasn’t possible, they asked why we didn’t have music in the waiting room to help keep everybody calm.
The Hush Foundation
This idea about music was the genesis of the Hush Foundation, which aims to make healthcare more human through creativity, art and kindness. Initially, Dr Crock commissioned composers to write music especially for hospital environments, and the results were dramatic.
‘At first it was just for the children, but it was having a great impact on the parents too. And when the parents are calm, the children are much calmer.’
Patient safety improved; and calmer, safer patients led to better staff safety as well. ‘It had a flow-on effect,’ Dr Crock says, becoming ‘a positive feedback loop’.
Since the Hush Foundation began 25 years ago, it has become the biggest commissioner of new Australian music in the country, and its music is now in hospitals all over the country and around the world.
Gathering of Kindness
In 2010, Dr Crock received a Churchill Fellowship, and travelled to the US, UK and Ireland to meet patient safety experts from around the world. ‘What I learned was that the biggest challenge for patient safety was actually how staff were treating each other,’ she says.
‘If you have staff who are not treating each other with kindness and respect, then they don’t have the capacity to do patient-centred care.’
This changed her focus, and when she returned home she connected with Australian playwright Alan Hopgood, who had written a play about his prostate cancer journey. ‘He’d stage it in pubs and clubs out in the bush, and the blokes would all come and watch it, then talk after the play, ask questions, and then they’d go get checked.’
Dr Crock thought they could do something similar focused on hospital staff wellbeing and safety, communication, and bullying and harassment in the workplace. ‘So Alan and I wrote some plays based on true stories, and we’ve taken them to more than 200 hospitals and aged care facilities since 2012.’
Every single hospital audience recognised the scenarios in the plays. This was, Dr Crock says, evidence of ‘a crisis in the culture in healthcare and how we all treat each other in the workplace.
If we don’t get this right for ourselves, then things go wrong for the patients and the families.’
In response, she started Gathering of Kindness with Compassion Revolution’s Mary Freer. With undeniable evidence that staff wellbeing correlates to patient wellbeing, Gathering of Kindness aims to humanise healthcare and change the systemic culture. This includes changing organisational behaviour towards employees, staff behaviour towards each other, and patient and family behaviour towards staff.
‘This is for all of us. We want a kind health system for everybody.’
Gathering of Kindness brings together healthcare workers and managers with actors, artists, researchers, musicians and innovators, and asks everyone ‘to reimagine the healthcare experience by placing kindness, trust and respect as the fundamental guiding principles of the system’.
That serves as a foundation to then embed initiatives throughout whole organisations as an ongoing practice. This is key, because while Dr Crock acknowledges that buy-in from individuals is required, it’s vital to have organisations as a whole actively participating.
‘It needs to come from the top.’
And it works. The Hush Foundation and Gathering of Kindness report that organisations prioritising kindness see 16 per cent fewer sick days and up to 38 per cent lower staff turnover.
‘When we treat patients, colleagues and ourselves with kindness, care gets safer, communication gets clearer, and everyone’s wellbeing improves.’
Tips to start building a culture of kindness
Dr Crock will be presenting at the ANMF OHS Conference in March, where she will go into more detail about building a culture of kindness to enhance wellbeing and performance. But she shared a few initial tips with ANMF:
- Start where you are, and start small.
- You can’t wait until the whole organisation changes, but you can have a huge influence yourself on a daily basis.
- Flip the narrative: we’re good at picking up when someone hasn’t done something well. But noticing and celebrating when things go well – even small things – is a great start towards building a culture of kindness.’ It is just a small thing, but it can have a huge flow-on effect.’
Hear more from Dr Catherine Crock AM at the ANMF (Vic Branch) OHS Conference: March to Safety on Friday 27 March 2026. This conference offer five hours CPD. Register now.
