Carolyn Booker, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer of Northside Hospital Forsyth in Cumming, Georgia, was troubled by how violence was making its way into places she considered sacred, like hospitals, churches, and schools, and thought kindness could provide an antidote.
So in 2018, she started looking at the concept of kindness and, through a Google search, saw the positive effects of being kind and then got the idea to do something. Booker developed The Kindness Initiative, which has caught on and rippled throughout Northside’s campuses. Since its inception, The Kindness Initiative has changed the culture of the Northside Hospital System. We’re delighted to honor Booker as our Nurse of the Week.
The Kindness Initiative Creates a Buzz
Booker’s definition of kindness is when you do something for someone to make them feel better, with no expectation of anything in return. For example, Booker says she took a huge basket of holiday candy to the nurse’s station in labor and delivery and said, “Guys, this is for you.” The reaction to that unexpected act just gave her a buzz.
She researched and found an organization called kindness.org, which promotes kindness through kindness toolkits. “Our Kindness Initiative started because of this thought about how we could take kindness and make it the norm within the hospital setting,” she adds.
Then she got the idea to do a Kindness Challenge in November 2018, spurred by kindness.org, to challenge employees to log acts of kindness. These acts could be in their community, home, or work, and employees had to log and submit 12 acts of kindness. Booker says the goal was 10,000 acts of kindness by May 11.
When an employee submitted 12 acts of kindness, they received a T-shirt, and Booker says that component turned out to be almost like cultural iconography. It was a gray T-shirt with white and black lettering and a red heart, and it said, “You have a choice. Choose kindness. I did.”
Booker says they had to order three times to keep up with the acts of kindness being submitted.
More Than 11,000 Acts of Kindness
Then by May 11, employees had logged more than 11,000 acts of kindness. These acts of kindness include acknowledging one another, making eye contact, speaking to each other, and seeing each other. Booker says the whole environment was positively charged because of this particular activity.
The acts of kindness were the talk of the organization at that time. “It was very powerful, and we went on to take kindness and just interweave it into everything,” says Booker.
The Kindness initiative is now a part of the Northside Hospital system across the system. Booker says they have a systemwide team—the Kindness Through Communication team—that meets every week to work on ways to embed kindness into the organization’s culture.
As part of the Kindness Initiative, Northside engaged an organization that has created a program called Excellence in Action for peer and leader recognition. This system is similar to Facebook, but it’s an internal Facebook, so there is a live stream of this recognition on our intranet.
Booker says as an organization, Northside ensures all their service standards contain kind elements, which include supporting co-workers, how they demonstrate kindness toward their patients and ways they can be fiscally responsible and kind to their work environment.
Our Nurse of the Week proves that kindness is the antidote for creating a positive health system culture!
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