The Quiet Power of Small Things reflects on how moments of connection, or their absence, shape our experiences of care. Beginning with a friend’s experience of a clinical encounter, the piece explores civility not as politeness, but as a relational practice that helps us feel seen, safe and human, especially in times of vulnerability. Drawing on stories from healthcare, and insights from thinkers including Martin Buber, Timothy Snyder and Intelligent Kindness, it invites us to notice the power of small gestures and to consider how practising presence might help us resist disconnection in an increasingly pressured world.

When healthcare slows down and stays relational, different things become possible. This story from Community Corner at Violet Melchett shows how time, trust and collaborative working across a Primary Care Network can support real change – and why this kind of care is not an optional extra, but core to how healing happens.

What if conflict isn’t something to avoid, but something we need to learn to practise well? In this reflective piece, a story shared by Ashish Bhatia at a Flourishing in Medicine gathering opens into a deeper exploration of conflict as a catalyst for relationship, learning and change. Moving between childhood experience, martial arts, cycling, everyday city life and healthcare encounters – including a moving account from Jens Foell – this blog invites us to consider how we might meet difficulty with steadiness, curiosity and more porous boundaries. Perhaps, with practice, there is beauty in conflict after all.

What happens when we find ourselves in new, unmapped terrain?

In this reflective piece, narrative ecologist Jim Jones shares how drawing maps, of places, people and the stories that bind them, has helped him arrive in unfamiliar landscapes, from the snowy forests of Canada to the chalk hills of southern England. As he begins his role with Sage Practices, Jim invites us to slow down, notice what is alive, and orient ourselves together in a field of care that is still emerging. This is not a map with fixed lines but a shared act of wayfinding: one shaped by relationship, attention and the quiet forces that help living systems flourish.

When GP Alasdair Honeyman jokingly asked how many poems he should include in his appraisal, he set off a small creative storm in our WhatsApp group. What followed was a cascade of poems, reflections and stories revealing how art and creativity help us stay human in a system that can so easily drain meaning from our work. From Linda Miller’s reminder that the only poem that matters is the one that changes your practice, to wider reflections on disenchantment, digital life and the quiet power of re-enchantment, this piece explores how poetry, mischief and deliberate imperfection can open cracks in our tightly run systems through which fresh air, connection and possibility might enter.

AI is moving rapidly into mental health care: a magical remedy for workforce shortages and a means to restore efficiency to a strained and broken system. But when the primary measure of medical progress becomes productivity, we risk hollowing out what makes medicine an embodied healing profession. The danger is not that intelligent machines will take our place, but that clinicians are becoming more machine-like: efficient, compliant and disconnected from their patients, each other, their internal world and the craft of understanding what it is to be human.

Dr Connie Junghans Minton, GP at Millbank Medical Centre and senior research fellow, Westminster and Imperial College, tells us about her journey with Community Health and Wellbeing Workers

“People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

Amid the haste of modern care, when attention can be stretched, Dr Iona MacCallum offers a quiet reminder of how the simplest acts can return us to love and presence.

In medicine we write a great deal, yet the language of reports, targets and clinical notes often struggles to reach the places where meaning lives. Poetry can dwell there. It helps us cross the spaces that divide us: between doctor and patient, self and other, loss and repair.

At Sage, we are honoured to share poems like this as small acts of remembering: that care is not only a science but also an art, capable of holding what is too tender or complex for ordinary speech. Such words can help us listen again, to ourselves, to one another and to what it means to heal.

Here, Dr Joe Witney offers a poem that speaks to the courage of showing up, the ache of missed moments and the quiet hope that connection still matters.

Amid the everyday demands of general practice, Dr Rupal (Roo) Shah and colleagues remind us that the heart of healthcare beats in the spaces between people. Their work explores how meaning-making is not an optional extra but essential to care – a moral act that connects compassion, courage and justice.

Through writing and conversation, Roo invites us to pause, reflect, and rediscover what matters most in the everyday work of healing.

The Social Shapla group at Creative Health Camden shows how creativity can build trust, confidence, and belonging – transforming a health centre into a place of warmth and welcome.

Welcoming Lower Clapton General Practice to the Sage Practice Network

We’re delighted to welcome Lower Clapton General Practice as one of the first practices to join our Sage Practice Network since launching the website last week.

When we were designing the Sage emblem, we wanted more than a logo. We wanted a picture that could carry a story – with characters, patterns and symbols that reach us in ways beyond words. Each element was chosen carefully, but also with a sense of play. Health and care are serious matters, but if we can’t laugh along the way, we risk missing something vital.

“Sometimes coherence can take you by surprise.”
In this reflection, Jim explores what happens when science, intuition, and human connection meet — through the lens of ecology, complexity theory and a flourishing WhatsApp group of healthcare, allied professionals and citizens. From the relational wisdom of river volunteers to the need for mystery and meaning in medicine, this piece is a call to honour the life between the metrics.

Food is more than fuel. It is deeply relational - connecting us to our environment, our communities, and even to the unseen worlds within us. The simple act of eating ties us to the soil, to the hands that grew and prepared our food, and to the histories and traditions carried in each meal. Yet, modern medicine often isolates nutrition as a biochemical equation, reducing food to calories and macronutrients, stripping away its social, cultural, and ecological dimensions.

It started with a conversation. No, several conversations. Around kitchen tables, in the corridors of clinics, at the edges- of streets, of parks, woodlands, heathlands and on the shores of rivers. Conversations between people who care- about health, about healing, and not just for individuals, but for communities, ecosystems, and the world beyond human reach.

Sage Elders: an imaginary interview with Professor Abraham Verghese.

Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine.