Pip Hardy is a co-founder of the Patient Voices Programme (www.patientvoices.org.uk), established in 2003 in an attempt to make healthcare safer, more humane, dignified, respectful, patient-centred and compassionate through the creation and sharing of personal stories of health and illness, hope and hopelessness, care and lack of it. The Programme was awarded the BMJ Excellence in Education Award in 2010.
Pip has a degree in English literature and an MSc in lifelong learning. Her working life has included teaching, counselling, writing, editing and educational publishing. In 2000, she established Pilgrim Projects, a small education consultancy specialising in healthcare quality improvement. For the past two years, she has served as Curriculum and Learning Lead for NHS Improving Quality’s School for Health and Care Radicals, voted one of NESTA’s New Radicals in 2014.
As well as running a business, facilitating digital storytelling workshops, spending time with children and grandchildren and looking after a small menagerie of animals, Pip is completing her PhD looking at the potential of digital storytelling to transform healthcare. She also serves as a co-opted member on the board of CAIPE (Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education).
Along with Tony Sumner, she has recently completed a book to celebrate the first ten years of Patient Voices: Cultivating compassion: how digital stories are transforming healthcare, published by Kingsham Press, available here: http://bit.ly/1IoAYAX
