Guest Blog: Reset and Reimagine with Joy – post COVID-19 at Kent Community Health NHS Trust

By 12th August 2020Uncategorised

We are delighted to welcome Sarah Donovan, Head of Service Improvement, at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust as our guest blogger.  Sarah and the team at KCHFT have been avid tweeters in the past few weeks, demonstrating how there has never been a better time to bring Joy to our work.  We’ll let her tell it from here…

 

15s30m is something the Quality Improvement (QI) Team at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) has been interested in for a while.

Many of our colleagues have been sharing time saving and joy at work tips with their teams for some time, but we thought it would be useful to bring all these good ideas together, to share them far and wide and to generate some more.

During March, April and June we had many colleagues temporarily moved from their usual roles to support colleagues on the frontline, more than 450 people within a workforce of 5,000.

This meant many clinical and non-clinical staff going into teams and services with fresh eyes and instantly spotting clunky processes or where things could possibly be done more efficiently.

By July, as many returned to their usual services, they brought back much learning with them and were also enthusiastic about not doing things the way their service has always done them, but looking to see if there were new ways, which could bring improvements.

Reset & Reimagine

Within the trust we have a reset and reimagine programme underway as a direct result of COVID-19, as we look to improve everything we do, from nursing care and virtual consultations, to the health and wellbeing of our colleagues.  With all of this happening, it was the perfect time to run a 15s30m campaign.

We encouraged colleagues to send us their 15s30m missions via our staff newsletter and our intranet – and were flooded with responses, which we shared on our QI website and our QI Twitter profile, as well as internally. The campaign has been very popular and three weeks later tips and ideas are still coming in.

We’ve had tips about:

  • using digital minute-takers at meetings

  • improving out of office replies,

  • using the subject line of emails to the best effect

  • making sure we take a patient’s email address, as well as phone number

  • marking information relevant to key performance indicators (KPIs) on patient notes to help us meet waiting time targets

  • colleagues looking at action logs before meetings

  • and email etiquette – as well as one of our mental health champions sharing an idea to send colleagues a positive quote to start each day.

Many of the missions are just small things – but they are things that can make a big difference.

So many great ideas came out of our summer campaign that we are thinking of running another 15s30m drive before the end of the year.

Thank you for the inspiration 15s30 and for sharing what we are doing.

 

Like to know more at 15s30m, and how you can support your team, department or workforce to reduce frustration and increase #JoyInWork? 15s30m is Quality Improvement for those who think Quality Improvement isn’t for them.

We’d love to hear from you

Dan&Rachel

@15s30m      Info@15s30m.co.uk            www.15s30m.co.uk

With thanks to @sonia_sparkles for our fabulous pictorials

Rachel Pilling and Dan Wadsworth are the winners of the 2017 NHS Improvement Sir Peter Carr Award. They’d love to hear from you…follow them on twitter @miss_pilling  or @danwods or get in touch using email above.