Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
A presentation with Lorna Clark, Assistant Director of Pharmacy, and Sinead Greener, Lead Clinical Pharmacist, Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Lorna Clark, Assistant Director of Pharmacy, and Sinead Greener, Lead Clinical Pharmacist, discuss implementing the ImproveWell solution within the Pharmacy Department at Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (“the Trust”).
With a team of 450 non-registered and registered staff across clinical, administration, manufacturing, supply and delivery, patient safety and education and training, the Pharmacy team at the Trust is a complex operation. These diverse groups all have different priorities, and prior to ImproveWell there was a feeling that staff did not have a voice in decisions or change.
“We wanted to make sure everybody’s voice was heard…our staff surveys showed us that staff felt they were not involved in decisions…[they were saying] we want you to involve us more and listen to us.”
Having heard about the ImproveWell solution during an event by Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Lorna and Sinead felt it ticked all the boxes for them. They looked at other digital solutions, but “we really felt that ImproveWell gave us more, it gave us more of what we wanted,” explains Lorna.
Strong foundations
To assist with the launch of the new programme, Ben and Nish from the ImproveWell Customer Success team visited the various sites and helped get staff engaged with the idea of ImproveWell with demos, branded freebies and talks.
After just 12 months, already 40% of the pharmacy workforce has registered on the platform. Each member of staff is allocated to a team within the app, according to band, or function, and every team has a lead. In addition, Sinead and Lorna chair a working group that meets every other week, where all the improvement ideas submitted are reviewed to make sure every suggestion is followed up.
In addition each month an information-sharing session is held on Microsoft Teams for the entire department, enabling everybody to hear some of the ideas and how they have been actioned. An information bulletin is also published which is sent out to people and posted on boards around the department to share the changes that are happening.
Small but mighty ideas
“As pharmacists or technicians going around the ward, oftentimes there’s nowhere to put your laptop. So people were resting laptops on bins or just in their arms as they were trying to follow the ward round. A suggestion came into the app of getting carts – which has been brilliant,” says Sinead. This idea has been particularly helpful for pregnant staff.
Another idea involved moving from daily to monthly monitoring of fridges, which with advancements in digital technology are now measured automatically. This was a suggestion had been often discussed, but it took the ImproveWell solution for the change idea to have a home and become reality.
Similarly, a lead technician had been suggesting that the books used by nursing staff for control drugs on the wards were updated to a more reliable automatic process through the dispensing unit.
“He had talked about this for a long time, and then ImproveWell came in and he put it on the app, and it’s been a fantastic change. He also followed the proper Quality Improvement process. I don’t think he would have felt as empowered to lead on it without the ImproveWell app. But everyone thought it was a great idea and encouraged him to go with it. He engaged with stakeholders, got some baseline data, did a little trial and now it’s being rolled out on some of the wards.”
No idea is too small, as Sinead concludes. “ImproveWell is about making everybody’s voice count. And it doesn’t matter how small the idea.”
