Every year the Oxford University Press (OUP) selects a Children's Word of the Year and in 2024, OUP used two language surveys involving 6280 children aged 6–14 years from all regions of the UK (OUP, 2024). In the first survey conducted by the OUP's Educational Research Forum, more than 3000 primary and secondary children and their teachers discussed which words they felt had been important during 2024. Three words emerged from an analysis of the data, namely, ‘kindness’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘conflict’.
A second survey of 2000 children, conducted with Opinium, asked the children to choose their Children's Word of the Year 2024 from the shortlisted words—kindness, artificial intelligence and conflict. More than half of the children (61%) said kindness was their chosen word for 2024; it was more frequently chosen by children in the younger age groups (ages 6–8 years: 72%, ages 9–11 years: 64%, ages 12–14 years: 50%). A quarter of the children (25%) chose ‘artificial intelligence’, and a minority selected ‘conflict’ (7%).
Andrea Quincey, a director at OUP, speculated that the children had an awareness of mental health needs and understood that others may be facing invisible challenges (OUP, 2025). She further suggested that children recognised the importance of empathy and tolerance together with the importance of the language that is used, with kindness being a solution, and something that everyone can display to make a difference.
One child wrote: ‘Because it's important to be kind as you don't know who is suffering’, and another wrote: ‘With so much going on in the world we should all be kind to each other’. Teachers also suggested that children and young people have a growing awareness of the wider impact of kindness on mental wellbeing, especially within the context of global violence and current conflicts in the media. One child wrote: ‘If more people showed kindness, the world would be a better place’, while another wrote: ‘Because I think at the moment with all the conflict and the issues the world faces that kindness is a good way to go’.
There are undoubtedly lessons for adults to draw from this wisdom of children, which may counteract what appears to be a loss of inhibition subsequent to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, disgraceful trolling and other behaviours are widely reported with members of parliament (MPs) and other public figures having to take protective measures for themselves and their families. Just recently, MP Kim Leadbeater described her experience of ‘an erosion in people's ability to disagree well’ and the descent into ‘personal insults, threats, abuse, intimidation’ and ‘nastiness’ (BBC, 2025). Although not to the same extent, the NHS Staff Survey 2023 revealed that just over a quarter of staff reported a lack of kindness and respect from colleagues—71.24% of respondents agreed that the people they work with are understanding and kind to one another (q8b), while 72.34% felt that colleagues are polite and treat each other with respect (q8c) (NHS England, 2024). Drawing on their integrative review, Frangieh et al (2025) have asserted that some form of incivility in the workplace is a common experience of nurses with poor leadership in the workplace playing its part.
‘There are undoubtedly lessons for adults to draw from this wisdom of children, which may counteract what appears to be a loss of inhibition subsequent to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, disgraceful trolling and other behaviours are widely reported with members of parliament (MPs) and other public figures having to take protective measures for themselves and their families.’
The challenge of recruiting and retaining healthcare staff is reported frequently in the media—for example, falling student nurse recruitment (BBC, 2024a) and agency costs incurred to cover nurse vacancies (BBC, 2024b). At the end of March 2024, the reported vacancy rate for NHS England registered nurses was 7.5%. This equates to 31 000 vacant posts, with other vacancies being covered by expensive agency staff. The 2023 NHS England staffing survey highlighted that only 29% of registered nurses and midwives agreed or strongly agreed that ‘there are enough staff at their organisation for them to do their job properly’ (q3i) (NHS England, 2024). And worryingly, the recent Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) data indicated that application numbers for nursing have fallen by a third (by 35% in England and by 34% across the UK as a whole) since 2021 (UCAS, 2025). Falling student nurse recruitment will exacerbate future nurse vacancies and will also have implications for recruitment into district and community nursing posts.
‘It seems that intentional kindness in the workplace can both mitigate workplace incivility and develop a kindness culture. This emphasises the important role of community nurse leaders in establishing an appropriate workplace culture which legitimises self-care and self-compassion alongside not tolerating any form of incivility.’
An imperative must be the retention of the current and future nursing workforce alongside improved recruitment initiatives. To this end, kindness in the workplace together with self-kindness have their part to play. While and Clark (2021) noted the intense pressure within community nursing services during COVID-19 because of their absorption of care demand when the hospitals were stretched, and its potential to cause work-related stress and burnout. This level of work pressure has not abated with all health services remaining stretched with staff vacancies and seasonal pressures, alongside efforts to deliver extra NHS appointments and reduce waiting lists.
There is growing evidence that self-compassion and its component self-kindness are able to enhance personal resilience and wellbeing within the workplace and reduce burnout, depression and anxiety (Hughes et al, 2024). ‘Self-compassion entails
- (a) Being kind and understanding toward oneself in times of pain or failure,
- (b) Perceiving one's own suffering as part of a larger human experience, and
- (c) Holding painful feelings and thoughts in mindful awareness' (Barnard and Curry, 2011).
Self-compassion is a positive state of mind (Klimecki and Singer, 2012), which involves being open to one's own pain and can be developed (Hughes et al, 2024). Dev et al (2018) argued that self-compassion enables nurses to better manage personal stress through recognising what is within an individual's control in the workplace.
A pre-COVID-19 pilot study (Durkin et al, 2016) of community nurses (n=27) studying at a northern university in England found that those who scored high on self-compassion and wellbeing measures also reported less burnout. Greater compassion satisfaction was also positively associated with compassion for others and wellbeing, while also being negatively correlated with burnout. Durkin et al (2016) recommended teaching self-compassion skills so that nurses do not neglect their emotional and psychological needs in stressful situations. They speculated that nurses who judge themselves harshly may be overly self-critical and feel guilty and stressed which impacts upon their emotional wellbeing. However, a grounded theory study with 30 nurses from across a range of settings, including the community, from two NHS Trusts found that nurses needed permission both from themselves and others to accept and engage in self-care and self-compassion (Andrews et al, 2020).
Lack of self-kindness is not unique to nurses; it has also been noted in doctors. A Dutch online study of cardiologists (n=374) found that while self-kindness was not directly associated with professional fulfilment, it was indirectly related to professional fulfilment through individual resilience and work-home interference (where work negatively influences functioning at home) (Bogerd et al, 2023). They suggested that self-kindness may enhance the clinician's resilience in the face of challenging situations including caring for ill patients so that the clinician takes less time to recover from such circumstances. This leaves more time to enjoy positive feelings at work and to experience professional fulfilment. Bogerd et al noted that self-kindness is a trainable skill through the use of regular self-compassion exercises, such as mindfulness.
Mindfulness formed the basis for the majority of the self-compassion interventions for nurses identified in a recent scoping review (Bian et al, 2025). The interventions encouraged present-moment awareness through formal and informal meditation. The evidence suggested that these interventions had a positive impact, albeit to varying extents, on the psychological wellbeing of the nurses and were acceptable to those who participated in the reviewed studies.
It seems that intentional kindness in the workplace can both mitigate workplace incivility and develop a kindness culture. This emphasises the important role of community nurse leaders in establishing an appropriate workplace culture which legitimises self-care and self-compassion alongside not tolerating any form of incivility.