My name is Helen Rollé and I am the Associate Director of Improvement. I am excited to be able to write this guest blog to talk about ‘A Year of Improvement’ that is starting here at ELHT.
At ELHT we are committed to improving safe, personal and effective care and we have lots of amazing improvement work going on with teams using our SPE+ improvement methodology.
It is recognised more and more that colleagues find it difficult to access improvement training in the classroom, often due to clinical demands. However, getting as many people involved in continuously improving our Trust, how we work and ultimately our patient experience is really important. So, in true improvement style we want to review how our training is offered and look to design a new way that will be both accessible for all colleagues and innovative in its delivery.
Did you know in the last two years we have trained 701 colleagues to support them to improve the work that they do? That’s been done through a range of courses we offer, including core Level 2 and Level 3 SPE+ improvement training or our improvement coaching course. In addition, 500 more colleagues who are on training programmes such as junior doctors, medical students and trainee advanced nurse practitioners have learnt some elements of improvement method, supporting us to embed our learning and improvement culture.
It’s helping drive everyday improvement and get people excited about making positive change and we now have over 350 improvement projects registered across the Trust, all looking to improve the way we offer care to our patients.
But it’s also provided us with the insights about opportunities and barriers we have in the organisation relating to improvement and this has been the foundation to our new Year of Improvement programme.
With the significant operational, financial and workforce challenges that we face, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure we use our resources as best as we can and the ‘Year of Improvement’ is going to support colleagues to do just that. We will be focusing on providing improvement tools and techniques that anyone in the Trust can use in their daily work to help them share ideas for improving and also make small changes to ensure we are not wasting the valuable resources we have.
It will be a 12 month programme, led by myself and the Improvement Hub team. We will be using an improvement tool called a ‘Value Stream’ to guide our work and it’s sponsored by our Executive Director of Service Development and Improvement, Kate Atkinson, who will be supporting and championing our new approach.
One of the things we are particularly excited about introducing are ‘Rapid Improvement Weeks’ which we will be hosting to really speed up the testing of new ideas. During these weeks, the team will be out and about in the Trust to help test new ideas with staff.
There will be opportunity to get involved throughout the year and so if you have a passion for improvement or experience in education and want to be involved in future email Quality.Improvement@elht.nhs.uk and one of the team will be in touch.
This is a really exciting time to be able to lead such a piece of work, but we will need everyone’s help to make it a success.
If you have attended our training before, it will be helpful to have your feedback on what worked well as well as what we could do better. If you have never managed to get to our training, then we want to understand why so that our future design can take into account the real challenges that you face. Our job is to help make improvement for everyone and we can’t do this without you.
If you have feedback to provide – please send your comments to Quality.Improvement@elht.nhs.uk.
Our first Rapid Improvement Week will go live on 20 May. We plan to have a representative from every division in the organisation, so this will be a fantastic opportunity to bring people from different departments together.
During the week the team members will receive training in improvement and then we will test ideas for a new way to deliver our Level 2 improvement course. It will consist of four improvement tools: TIMWOODS (identification of waste), 6S (6 phases to improve your environment), 5 Whys and the ‘Plan, Do, Study, Act’ testing tool. Being aware of these tools can make such a difference to how you do your work every day and we want to be able to teach and train all of our colleagues.
Yes, I said all of our colleagues! All 10,000! Over the next three years, we want all staff to be aware and understand these tools. For our first year, we want to teach and train 3,000 colleagues which is ambitious but has huge potential.
If you want to be part of this exciting programme and support us in achieving our aim, please email Quality.Improvement@elht.nhs.uk. You do not need any experience, so if you have some enthusiasm for making a difference, we welcome you and your ideas to share this journey with us. Or, if you prefer, follow our journey on X (formally Twitter) @ELHT_QI.
Welcome to our Year of Improvement!
Take care,
Helen Rollé
Associate Director of Improvement