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Dave Dawes Explains how Nurses can Become Social Entrepreneurs

The first part of our interview with social entrepreneur Dave Dawes covered his experiences of going from a <a href = “http://www.pronurse.co.uk/education/articles/1898-pronurse-interview-dave-dawes-nurse-and-social-entrepreneur”>nurse to a chief exec to a social entrepreneur. Here he talks about how nurses can become entrepreneurs.

DD:

There have been a history of nurse entrepreneurs for quite some time, it just never had a high profile. For example, Mary Seacole ran a hotel and used the money from that to buy dressings and medicines for the care she was delivering in the Crimea. Unlike Florence Nightingale she didn’t have a bucket load of money. There have been nurses like that ever since, but they tend to have a fairly low profile.

I am trying to raise the profile of nurse entrepreneurs and in particularly to work with nurse social entrepreneurs.

PN:

So what exactly is a social entrepreneur?

DD:

Social entrepreneurs are people who are running their organisation for the public good, they are tackling a social problem. There are a number of nurses who have been doing that, people like Lance Gardner, myself, Jo Pritchard at Central Surrey and so on. There seems to be a growing interest in it, especially from people who say that they want more freedom than they get from working in big bureaucracies. They are not driven to make a massive pile of cash for themselves but by making care better or solving health or social problems.

PN:

You have lots of great quotes on your web site about breaking the mould and not being afraid to challenge the status quo – doesn’t this sort of behaviour run the risk of being seen as whistle blowing?

DD:

I explicitly don’t encourage whistle-blowing, I’ve coached a lot of people through that process. There are various ways of approaching problems in clinical areas and whistle-blowing involves going above your managers to the senior managers, to the media, to outside organisations and so on. There is inevitably a cost and it is almost guaranteed that you will not be able to work in your area afterwards.

The worst examples, and these are the ones we tend to hear about in the media, are where the person making the complaint don’t seem to have a plan. They see something and they immediately raise it in an unstructured way. They don’t get the support mechanisms behind them and often their career and their mental health deteriorates.

There are a lot of nurses who do it very successfully but you don’t hear about it as it has been handled well.

However, it can also be the people who don’t do anything about a problem that can suffer the most. If you look at examples like Bristol Royal Infirmary about 10 years ago where there were operations on kids who died needlessly, I think the people that came out worst there were the people who knew what was happening but didn’t say anything. They were the ones who tended to suffer through guilt afterwards. If you do speak up at least you get to think that at least you achieved something.

PN:

So, assuming I’m a nurse with a great idea to improve the area I work in, what are my first steps to becoming an entrepreneur and putting my ideas into practice?

DD:

That depends on whether you want to be an entrepreneur or an innovator. An innovator is someone who changes the way something is done and entrepreneur is someone who creates a new organisation. You don’t have to be an innovator to be an entrepreneur and you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to be an innovator.

For example, I worked with a nurse who wanted to change the way that meals were delivered on the ward. She was able to put those changes in practice but she didn’t create a new organisation to achieve this. You need to be clear about what you want to do. Do you just want to change a few things in your area or do you want to create a new organisation?

If you want to create a new organisation you will need lots of advice and I have lots of conversations with people, talking through their ideas, working out if it is feasible, what steps they need to take, how to get the money to start, etc. It’s all coachable but it is a bit much if you have never done it yourself.

PN:

You offer some of your courses for free, saying that you get income from other areas of your work as you believe “your development should be based on your need rather than your ability to pay.”

DD:

I have always done free courses and they are extremely popular! It struck me that there are a huge amount of nurses who never get any funding to go on a course. I did a survey recently that showed that a quarter of nurses had to either pay for their own courses or take annual leave to go on a course and that is something I have always thought was really unfair.

I’m not in business just to make money, but to solve some problems and a lot of nurses don’t get the training they need. You can either complain or lobby about it or just say, well here are some free courses! Our on-line seminars have been very popular which is where I take elements from my workshops and conferences and turn them into free Internet videos.

PN:

Is there is a link between running a social enterprise and nursing in that both involve caring for people in some way?

DD:

At a very abstract level there might be, I think a lot of people are fundamentally driven to care for people. Some people become nurses or social workers, some are involved in the charity sector and some end up in social enterprise. I think it is something that people can be embarrassed to talk about.

I often hear nurses talking about their poor wages or difficult shift patterns when they knew all about that when they first went in to nursing. It didn’t matter to them then because there was other stuff driving them. If nurses who deeply want to care are put into jobs where they are not able to care properly they get very frustrated and often end up really stressed or dysfunctional and try to get jobs outside of nursing. I help nurse entrepreneurs and I help social entrepreneurs and by and large they are fairly discrete groups of people.

Useful Links to nursing information by Dave Dawes

www.Entreprenurses.net helps to develop people into entrepreneurs.

www.NursingLeadership.org.uk has probably the biggest collection of free nursing leadership resources on the web.

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