Problem
Since the NHS was created in 1948, the population has grown, people are living longer, and the range of services required of the NHS has expanded, with long-term conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and mental health now prevalent. Meeting those needs has required a higher degree of collaboration between all aspects of the healthcare community.
As such, the array of skills and expertise across Healthier South Wirral is truly exceptional. The rapid pace of change required of us during the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of bringing all of that expertise and knowledge together now more than ever before, when tackling the challenges we all face.
In a recent innovation survey shared with employees across the Primary care network:
90% of people felt like they have a lot of ideas that would benefit our Primary Care Network but lack a centralised platform to share their ideas with the wider HSW team, manage and action those ideas.
Solution
Healthier South Wirral wants to tap into the extensive knowledge that exists across the community to help us meet the challenges we face such as improving the experience of providing care for patients and increasing value for money in utilising new technologies. With that in mind HSW has provided the Idea Drop platform to facilitate the sharing of ideas from every employee in the Trust.
To celebrate the launch of the ideation platform, HSW and Idea Drop delivered personalised welcome packs to every employee in the Trust.
The welcome packs were provided for the most outstanding onboarding experience and to inform everyone about their roles and responsibilities on Idea Drop and how they can impact the future of their organisation by submitting ideas and collaborating with others. Personalised welcome packs also featured some of the most inspiring stories of impactful innovations across the network to inspire employees and encourage ideation on the Idea Drop platform (Health Connections Mendip and Beacon’s Urgent visiting service).
Initially, a challenge was posted on Idea Drop to solicit ideas about how Healthier South Wirral can better support staff in times of uncertainty, stress, and isolation, whether they be days or years.
Life can be very serious so why not encourage a bit of fun, have charity days across the network, cake bakes, challenges – we could commit to one a month and each month a practice could take a lead in setting the topic/activity. Not only will this get us away from our desks for some time, it could benefit local communities or keep us active. We could have our first at the Oval, set an example to our patients 🙂
This idea was chosen as one of the initial rounds of ideas to be implemented and rolled out across the 7 practices.
Conclusion
In employee surveys, employees from Healthier South Wirral revealed that while they are confident in their ability to suggest positive improvements to the organisation.
The implementation of Idea Drop is a vital first step in providing employees with a clear and transparent means of submitting ideas and seeing them progress through to delivery. To successfully adapt to Covid-19 will require all voices to be heard and people from each of the seven practices to contribute to our future success.
“With its easy-to-use interface on desktop and mobile app, Idea Drop enables everyone across the Healthier South Wirral network to submit ideas on the go, allowing us to ramp up the pace and scale of change and make truly impactful innovations” – Karen Livesey (Project Lead and Senior manager) to HSW
Ready to see Idea Drop in action?
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