Case Study

How we helped a health board create a community of employee innovators

How a health board connects with its staff is crucial. Ensuring their ideas are heard and actioned drives quality improvement ensuring our communities are kept healthy.

14,000+

Staff provided with direct access to SimplyDo across web and mobile

88%

SimplyDo users now felt connected to the improvement process

76%

New ideas being implemented or resolved

SimplyDo has allowed us to access staff ideas in a way that would not have been possible without it. We are now able to link people together to work on similar ideas resulting in shared endeavour and less duplication.

Paul Gimson, Assistant Director Improvement Culture Capability and Delivery, Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board

Background:

Creating a culture of improvement in the NHS

Summary:

1

Creating a culture of staff-led quality improvement

2

Underpinning the activity of a newly formed improvement hub

3

Managing volume of ideas with a small and incredibly busy team

Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTMUHB) set out the ambition for delivering quality improvement through forming Improvement Cwm Taf Morgannwg (iCTM). This directorate is responsible for change across the organisation while coordinating improvement and innovation activity. This included creation of an ideas scheme that breaks through traditional NHS hierarchy and offers a meaningful voice to those best placed to improve patient care i.e. front line staff.

The iCTM team wanted to capture and implement the best ideas enabling efficiency savings, demand reduction and better health outcomes. As a new directorate, it was crucial to raise awareness of the improvement and innovation process amongst staff to support ongoing culture change. This was all during a very challenging time for NHS staff who were under a significant amount of pressure.

Solution:

Unlocking staff ideas to solve healthcare challenges

Summary:

1

Creating challenges to staff for ideas which are linked to the priorities of the health board

2

Developing a safe and secure open digital community for staff to engage with other innovators

3

Adopting idea project boards enabling increased levels of progression to implementation

We worked with the iCTM team to deeply understand their strategic and operational goals. This led to deploying our challenge-led approach so that staff ideas were focused on what really mattered in improving healthcare.

iCTM were passionate about creating an online improvement community. This needed to be engaging to capture the hearts and minds of their busy teams. So we deployed our social media style ideas community designed to be quick and easy to understand. This allowed ideas to be created while being open to be viewed, liked and commented on by other staff members.

As ideas were submitted, iCTM could progress these using in-product idea project boards. This automated many of the historically manual tasks enabling employees to be kept engaged and informed of progress on their ideas. The iCTM team were then able to focus their expertise on progressing the most important ideas.

Impact:

Improving patient care

Summary:

1

Connecting staff to delivering the organisational strategy in improving patient care

2

Supporting culture change by raising awareness of the improvement process

3

Increasing numbers of ideas progressing through to implementation or resolution

The ideas were focused around a range of strategic and operational challenges to improve everyday work in our NHS services. A user poll highlighted that 88% of staff now felt connected to the organisation’s improvement process.

The range of ideas has been vast and covers areas such as menopause, gestational diabetes and medicines safety. Plus, 76% of ideas have progressed to resolution or implementation. As a result, there have been over 250 improvement projects ranging from improving identification of delirium through to air filtration in healthcare.