Invest in staff, give us good leaders, and make us sustainable: what you told us at our engagement event

With healthy eating classes, mindfulness workshops and post-it notes galore, last week’s ‘Shaping the future’ engagement event was a fun-filled and interactive day.

With nearly 150 staff taking part from across the organisation, the day was broken into three sections:

• Listening: where delegates took part in a 60 minute exercise facilitated by a table leader, allowing staff to talk about their concerns.
• Understanding values: this session launched the Trust’s new values and allowed discussion for what behaviours staff expect to see and experience at work
• Health and wellbeing: where delegates took part in one of four pre-chosen workshops, including mindfulness and personality testing.

So what were the key themes? You said that…

People and leadership

• You want development opportunities (both clinically and non-clinically), including bursaries and proper clinical pathways
• You want to feel valued, no matter what area of the Trust you work in., and have regular appraisals and PDRs.
• You want to be  included in decision-making
• You want consistency across the Trust, so we feel like one organisation, not three
• You want clarity and stability in our leadership and our direction as a Trust
• You want feedback from leaders and managers to be the norm
   

Sustainability

• You want us to use our resources smarter and better match our clinical capacity to the needs of the patient
• You want us to work better with other providers so we triage more effectively, and better manage demand
• You want to be empowered to use clinical pathways in the best interests of our patients.

So what have we done following your feedback?

• Supporting education: we’re looking at what money can be set aside for development and bursary opportunities, with the idea that everyone has a fair and equal opportunity to apply for funding.
• Living the values: we’ve developed a series of ‘expected behaviours’ [include link] linked to our values, that we’ll be embedding across the Trust.
• Inclusion in decision making: when we make decisions, we’ll include the end-user to make sure the decisions we make are the right ones, e.g. involving clinicians when we develop a new ePCR model.
• Stability of leadership: we will fill interim posts with permanent people.
• Clarity of direction: we will develop a strategy that we can all focus on. The first draft will be shared with you early next year, and we’ll be asking for your feedback before the final one is released.
• Building our ability to manage demand: we have introduced clinical coordinators into EOC to help us better triage calls, have an ongoing trial with GPs in EOC, and are working with 111 teams and commissioners to discuss how they can help reduce demand on our service. Please read Robert’s CEO message this week for more information on avenues we’re exploring [link].

Thank you to everyone who took part! But if you couldn’t attend this session, don’t worry – we’re hoping to run them regularly throughout the year. 

Published 29th October, 2015