Quality healthcare through an engaged NHS workforce

Most frontline NHS staff lack systematic opportunities to share their knowledge, experience and ideas for improvement with anyone else other than long-suffering partners at home or friends in the pub. Many line managers do not welcome suggestions for change or questioning about established practices. Workplace Innovation has developed innovative approaches to stimulating trust-based dialogue, leading to practical ideas for improvement with buy-in from managers and frontline staff alike

Clinical errors and organisational failures risk expensive litigation costs and require immediate remedial action, but they also offer an invaluable resource for learning and improvement. Workplace Innovation can facilitate learning from errors and root cause analysis using non-threatening techniques such as theatre and action learning.

Staff surveys typically paint a broad brush picture of workforce morale without pointing to concrete areas for improvement. Workplace Innovation’s online Resilience questionnaire probes deeply into ten key dimensions of working practice, enabling comparison against evidence-based practices and the degree of discrepancy between management perceptions and frontline employee experience. Based on a traffic light scoring system, it also signposts decision-makers to appropriate tools and resources for improvement.

"Teamworking" is talked about more often than it is practiced in the NHS. Real teamworking involves significant changes to working practices, with tangible benefits for staff and patients alike. Drawing on the outcomes of multinational action research, Workplace Innovation can deliver a comprehensive package for the implementation of multidisciplinary teamworking based on a clear set of practice standards.

Many Trusts have entered into partnership agreements with their Staff Side representatives, but how effective are these arrangements in stimulating employee engagement or quality improvement? Experience from Kaiser Permanente and many European countries suggest that partnership can play a vital role in engaging staff in quality improvement – but there are few cases of exemplary practice within the UK. Workplace Innovation can help Trusts and unions to strengthen their partnership arrangements in ways which achieve positive outcomes for staff and patients alike.

Staff side representatives in most Trusts rarely get an opportunity for the teambuilding, reflection or shared learning that could improve their performance and effectiveness as partners. Workplace Innovation can deliver bespoke timeout and training sessions to help Staff Side representatives, individually and collectively, enhance their contribution as informed partners in addressing difficult challenges and facilitating change.

Many mergers and restructuring initiatives in the health sector are driven by a strong business or clinical case, but fail to realise their potential in practice. Often this reflects an inadequate focus on the integration of frontline functions and teams including relationship building, knowledge sharing and the joint design of new protocols and procedures. Workplace Innovation’s experience in managing dialogue and teambuilding can play a key role in helping resourcing integration – both before and after the event.

Faced with the need to meet targets and achieve specific outcomes, different managers will behave in quite different ways. Some will appear to succeed by addressing the relevant performance measures – in short by "ticking boxes". Others will seek sustainable change and improvement, often by working between formal organisational structures in creative and entrepreneurial ways. What makes the difference? Workplace Innovation’s research has identified a series of individual and organisational practices that can lead to sustainable improvement rather than mere compliance with targets.

Middle managers are often cited as a significant obstacle to innovation and improvement, and there is plenty of evidence to support this view. However Workplace Innovation’s research reveals that such managers often receive little leadership or guidance from above, leading to lack of prioritisation, poor communication, inadequate opportunities for learning and aversion to change. While the answer may in part lie in competence development for middle managers, it may also lie in the redesign of wider organisational structures and practices. Workplace Innovation can support Trusts in creating an environment conducive to effective management behaviour and capability.

While the NHS is unique in many ways, it can nonetheless gain valuable lessons from other healthcare systems across the world and from other sectors in relation to challenges such as quality improvement, employee engagement, organisational change and productivity. Drawing on an extensive network of partners, Workplace Innovation can facilitate exchange of knowledge and experience with a wide range of  organisations in Europe, the US and Asia including benchmarking reports, seminars and conferences, and learning visits.

NHS managers and leaders enjoy surprisingly few opportunities to meet each other for peer learning and the exchange of experience. Workplace Innovation can create learning networkers designed to share problems and to knowledge of what works in meeting health service priorities.

Many staff acquire management responsibility as their careers develop with little opportunity to gain the skills and behaviours which get the best out of their teams. Workplace Innovation’s portfolio of accredited courses is specifically tailored to meet the needs of new and experienced frontline clinical and service managers in the NHS.