Building care and compassion—introducing Lego Serious Play to HCA education

Abstract

Lego Serious Play, an approach that seeks to foster creative thinking and teamwork, provides a mechanism by which adult learners can express their conscious thinking by using Lego bricks to physically represent their relationships with the outside world, their emotions and their building of meaning in relation to the world around them. Narrative storytelling is then used by the learners to articulate these ideas to an audience. They tell a story that represents issues of meaning in practice. This is a mechanism that involves using the hands in the process of creative expression, something that has long been documented in the field of cognitive neuroscience. This article provides an insight into how Lego Serious Play could potentially be integrated into the education and training of HCAs in practice, as a mechanism of facilitating their affective learning around care and compassion, subjects which have become so topical in the light of the Francis Report (2013) and the Cavendish Review (2013) . An adaptation of Gilbert's Multi-Modal Compassionate Mind Training is used to illustrate how Lego Serious Play might facilitate the construction of affective domain learning in healthcare assistant practice. The article concludes with an overview of how the process could improve the capacity of HCAs to communicate and articulate their contributions to HCA practice.