www.Streamflows.co.uk

October Newsletter

2009-10-03T14:35:25+01:00

Hello Healthcare Improvers!

Welcome to the Streamflows October Newsletter, which keeps you informed of healthcare courses and services to help you develop your team and services, your career and yourself.

Next Courses

30th October 09 Presenting with Power® Cardiff

19th & 20th November 09 Fearbusting!® Cardiff

Also, we will be adding an additional date for Which Improvement Methodology? Please do contact us if you would like to be offered a place on this course before we advertise it more widely.

Check out www.Streamflows.co.uk for all the courses and services that we offer.

Other Streamflows Services you may be interested in….

Coaching – Make rapid improvements to your work and personal life with a qualified, experienced coach.

Facilitation – Have your meeting or workshop professionally facilitated to enhance the quality of decisions and outcomes.

Virtual Assistance - get pay-as-you-go help with those all important documents and presentations.

Websites that Work - get an effective website for your service or project that gives you control and won't cost you the earth.

From the Blog…..
Key to Staff Involvement
Health and Wellbeing in the NHS?
WIsHing Things Better - top tips for creativity and innovation

Best of wishes in your healthcare improvement activities. Contact us to secure your place on one of our courses or to book any of our other services.

Neil Lloyd
www.Streamflows.co.uk

Key to Staff Involvement

2009-08-31T17:01:41+01:00

Lessons from Timpson

I recently had the pleasure of hearing CEO John Timpson talk about the workings of the company recognised through its ubiquitous shops acoss the UK offering key cutting and shoe and watch repairs (amongst other things).

John puts the success of the company's success down to what he calls 'Upside Down Management.' Staff at each store are empowered to innovate and make management decisions about their own store as well as make recommendations to the head office, which are evaluated and shared throughout the business. There is a fair, transparent system of incentives that all staff benefit from and John or a member of his executive team takes the time to personally 'walk round' the shops and discuss business with shop staff. The executive team see themselves as 'in service' to those on the frontline.

People seem to love working for Timpson. They are valued (and are recognised and credited for their successes), have varied roles within the shop and contribute to business improvement. Timpson is a UK wide network of independent services connected by the same aim and mission statement... drawing parallels?

John's book How to Ride a Giraffe is out now and explores how and why Timpson is still thriving on the high street despite the economic downturn and changes in consumer behaviour.

The company's strap line is "Great Service by Great People"

I wonder how we are applying these universal principles of good leadership and management and whether we are applying them often enough?

Health and Wellbeing in the NHS?

2009-08-28T16:43:43+01:00

It has always amazed me that the approach for staff health and wellbeing has not evolved more quickly in the NHS. Sickness absence is higher in the NHS than the rest of the public sector as a whole and the private sector - and sickness levels are often just the tip of the iceberg. The affect of staff general health and wellbeing on patient outcomes is notoriously difficult to measure although anyone working on the frontline knows how motivated, healthy, happy staff can make all the difference in delivering quality services.

In my own experience working in healthcare there has been a huge variation in how staff health and wellbeing has been addressed, depending on the organisations I've worked within as well as the departmental sub-culture. Where I've worked in teams that have nurtured employee health and wellbeing there has been greater success and happiness - amongst staff and patients.

So why then, do we continue to tolerate myopic management practices that create long term problems in the health of our educated and skilled workforce?

The Boorman Review's recently published Interim Report re-opens a welcome discussion, suggesting that:

“Rather than relying solely on occupational health services, we need to move towards a broader commitment to improving health and well-being across the workplace.”

We work for about 40 of the best hours of our week - it's time that we stop separating 'work' from 'life' in terms of the quality of experience we can expect. What I would like to see is better structures in place which support staff health and wellbeing, more effective leadership and management practices and staff empowered with the knowledge, skills and scope to maintain and improve their own health and wellbeing.

It is true that many of the issues affecting the health and wellbeing of an individual are endemic in broader society but in a world where our work forms such a significant part of our lives there is a social responsibilty for organisations to be part of the solution and not the problem.

Lets hope the Boorman Review makes a real difference to the lives of staff and patients and is not just another tick box activity that results in a sticking plaster being put over this chronic problem.

To read more about the Boorman Review and to download the interim report, go to www.nhshealthandwellbeing.org

New Healthcare Courses!

2009-07-25T22:00:43+01:00

Streamflows is pleased to announce its autumn programme of healthcare courses. For more information see the courses page.

Autumn 2009 programme (Cardiff):

1st and 2nd October Fearbusting!®
places now only available on 19th and 20th Nov

16th October Which Improvement Methodology?

30th October Presenting with Power®

19th and 20th Nov Fearbusting!®

These courses and others are available for inhouse delivery too - just contact us!

ALSO...

Streamflows has lauched the following additional services to help you get the most out of your healthcare activities:

Virtual Assistance - get pay-as-you-go help with those all important documents and presentations

Websites that Work - get an effective website for your service or project that gives you control and won't cost you the earth.

AND ...

Streamflows continues to offer coaching and facilitation.

So give your career or service an injection of can-do juice and get in touch!

WIsHing Things Better

2009-04-09T21:41:06+01:00

~ Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. ~
Theodore Levitt

I recently participated in a Creative Innovation Workshop provided by Welsh Innovations in Healthcare (WIsH) and expertly facilitated by Judith Proctor.

On the lips of the attendees, which included medics, nurses, allied health professionals, managers, coaches and IT professionals, were questions like:

How do we innovate...
-when we don't even have time to see all our patients?
-when we struggle to get the funding for even basic equipment?
-when our managers don't encourage innovation?
-when there's a blinkered focus on blunt targets?

Certainly there are challenges to face when innovating in the healthcare environment - the group cited problems with existing cultures or changes in the working climate that made it difficult to pursue an innovation project through to a fructiferous conclusion.

Aside from these initial grumbles, there was also hope and stories of success. One member had developed an innovative surgical technique; one had a service re-design solution; another had generated a model for knowledge and skills management. Some had worked on their projects outside of their work time.

It was encouraging to see that the spirit of innovation is still going strong. After all, it is innovation that has produced huge leaps forward in how we deliver services to the public.

So how can we create space for innovation to flourish whilst ensuring that we are meeting the immediate needs of our individual patients and the communities we serve? Balancing competing demands and optimising time to care needn’t stifle innovation. In fact it is often out of necessity that the best ideas come to the surface. And it's at these times that supporting innovation becomes even more important. Yes, innovation actually supports productivity! Now all we need to do is think and act.

It is the approach to creating and innovating, to thinking and acting that can make all the difference in releasing the desired benefits.

There are plenty of resources available to support your creativity and innovation. Here are a few tips to get you going:

On being creative

Take your time to generate all your thoughts and ideas about a situation before focusing on one solution. Keep your mind free, open and receptive.
Think from different perspectives:
a) Solution perspective - doing x would be great and it would also solve problems y and z
b) Problem perspective - x is a problem for us and we could solve it with y and/or z
c) Idea perspective - Idea x has popped into my thoughts. What uses could there be for idea x?
Step away from the problem. You may get some insights elsewhere which will shed light on the issue
Keep notebooks to write down ideas, thoughts, sketches, diagrams and mindmaps. A blank paged notebook is usually best (in A4 or A3 size). You could also use a pocket notebook, the voice recorder on your mobile phone or the sketch pad on your PDA / smartphone
Do something different - take a different route to work, for example, or go for a walk in your lunchbreak. This can help you detach from habitual cycles of thinking and give you a new perspective on a problem
Talk to people. Talking helps us organise and present our ideas and the feedback you get could stimulate even more ideas.
Write down what assumptions you are making when you generate your creative solutions - are these assumptions correct? What could be possible if they weren't?
Do some informal research on other innovations happening in healthcare and in other areas. Can you build on these ideas?
Think what really bugs you? Is there something just itching to be improved? How can you turn that pain into pleasure?
Try some blank page thinking - how would you do / create / invent something if you had to do it from scratch?

Getting from idea to implementation is the next challenge. Here are some tips on the whole innovation process

Evaluate your ideas. Which ideas are worth investing resources in? How does the innovation fit in with priorities? Test out the best ideas on a smaller scale first. If relevant, build a prototype - don't be afraid to go "Blue Peter" and use cheap materials like cardboard (if appropriate and safe to do so!)
Get people on board. How can you get people interested? Involving people in the process and decisions early will be appreciated - people are much more likely to adopt something new if they played a part in its design or application or if they were (at the very least) consulted!
Get a sponsor for your innovation project - someone senior in the organisation
Figure out what resources you need along the innovation journey. Can you get them?
Consider carefully how the project will be managed

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement have a great process for generating, testing and implementing innovations, which you can download here

And don't be afraid to share! If you're doing something great why not make it even greater and help spread the innovation across the organisation, community, region, country, world...!

Go create...

Next Streamflows Courses:

Vision to Delivery 21 May

Process Mapping for Improvement 25 June

Recommended Reads for Creativity and Innovation:

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono

Rethink: How to Think Differently by Nigel May Barlow

Creativity Tools from the NHS Institue for Innovation and Improvement

New Ground

2009-03-24T00:28:24+00:00

This weekend I was ‘chuffed’ to see a rare pair of choughs whilst walking around Dunraven Bay, between Cardiff and Swansea. There are fewer than 500 breeding pairs of choughs in the UK and generally speaking they stick to the far westerly side of the isles so it was particularly extraordinary to spot them in the south east of Wales. But there they were, feasting on the plentiful bugs with their distinctive red beaks and frolicking around on the grassy cliff top.

This got me thinking – how often do we venture out of our territory? And what stops us from doing it more often? Breaking out of our habits and daily rituals can give us new perspectives and fresh ideas – have you ever had a eureka moment when on holiday or after talking to someone new or just by doing something you don’t usually do? Yet we can end up treading the same worn paths if we’re not careful and miss out on all the wonderful things we can discover away from the beaten track.

In healthcare there are plenty of things we can learn if we step out of our tired schedules. Why not find out what other teams are doing and share experiences, maybe make that visit to another hospital to investigate how similar services are delivered there or invite others to your department and discuss new thinking and ways of working. Think across boundaries, across agencies – what can you learn from other sectors? Just like the chough, you may find lots of treasures in places where you haven’t looked before.
"I explored new ground;
so can you!" - the even rarer
Talking Chough

Welcome

2009-02-03T09:59:00+00:00

Hello and welcome to Streamflows.com blog!

This is the first Streamflows blog post so I thought it would be a great opportunity to let you know what you can expect to find here in future

Here you will find useful articles, ideas and inspiration about healthcare service improvement and development, personal development and information about forthcoming Streamflows courses

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Wishing you all the best in your healthcare activities

-Neil