In August, Contract Manager Susan Brooks and her Abbott colleagues took part in a corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity at the Royal Hospital of Neuro-disability (RHN) in Putney, London.

The team helped to care for and revitalise the communal garden space around the hospital’s brain injury unit – a peaceful outdoor area frequently used by residential patients and their visiting families. The garden serves as a safe, calming environment that helps to promote patient wellbeing.

What prompted your decision to do gardening for your CSR activity?

We have an Abbott Initiative called Community In Bloom, where Abbott colleagues donate bulbs to be planted in green spaces within the community. We wanted to bring that initiative over to help do something positive for the patients and healthcare professionals at the RHN.

The RHN team were very grateful for our bulb donations, which will be planted around the hospital grounds at a later date. We spent the day itself with our sleeves rolled up for a spot of garden maintenance.

It was such an enjoyable and rewarding experience that it informed my decision to do something similar for our second CSR day.

Tell us about the day. What did you get up to?

The brain injury unit at RHN has a beautiful garden space, which is accessible to all patients at the hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital doesn’t have the capacity to employ full-time gardening staff, so they very much rely on volunteers to help maintain their outdoor spaces. They were delighted to have our team offer to come along for the day and do everything in our power to help out.

We spent much of the day neatening up borders, pulling out weeds and taming the overgrowth. There was also a lot of hard graft involved with shovelling heavy soil and relocating piles of discarded wood to a safe spot. The hospital grounds are huge, with beautifully wooded areas and green spaces that patients and their families can walk around and enjoy. At one point, we met a team of volunteer gardeners who were creating new flower beds elsewhere on the grounds, which was lovely to see.

At the end of the day, the RHN team invited us inside the building, where they announced to the brain injury patients what we had been doing. It was a really emotional moment as we could see the appreciation felt by the patients, even though many were unable to communicate verbally. It really felt like we’d made a meaningful contribution, and it was a truly humbling experience.

Do you feel the CSR day was a good bonding experience for the team?

It was wonderful to get the team together in person. It’s not often possible for us to meet face-to-face, and it was a great pleasure to band together and do something out of the ordinary while enjoying good conversation. We had a lot of fun.

It was also a great opportunity to get to know some of the leads at the hospital who were really supportive and appreciative of us taking the time to help out. So it became not only a great team-building activity but also allowed us to build stronger connections with the healthcare professionals we work with.

Do you have any words of inspiration or encouragement for other people looking to take part in CSR activities?

I honestly can’t recommend it enough. It was rewarding to give something back and, particularly for us, seeing how the patients themselves appreciated what we’d been doing had a real emotional impact that I’ll never forget.

Taking action to do something positive, no matter how big or small, can make a difference and bring some pleasure to someone’s life, and I think that’s what it’s really all about.