Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) is one of the largest mental health providers in the country, operating across more than 40 different sites and serving a population of 1.3 million. BSMHFT has more than 4,000 dedicated staff members and is spread over 172 square miles. It is also one of the most innovative and complex mental health foundation trusts in the UK.
The Challenge
When Roisin Fallon-Williams was announced as the trust’s new chief executive, she realised that there were a number of new drivers and challenges that the trust needed to take into account when planning their strategy for the future to deliver care for the public that is both high quality and safe.
One of Roisin’s top priorities was to ensure that the trust had a clear direction and strategy that was shaped and influenced directly by the people who were going to be executing it. She believed that it was more essential than ever for the organisation’s vision and strategy to be understood and shared by all.
“The way we’ll go about our business is something that really feels important to us. Shared values is the starting point of that. We’ve got to act them, behave them but more importantly we have got to believe in them. Why do we come to work? What do I value? What does this organisation value?”
Roisin Fallon-Williams, CEO
The Solution
That’s why BSMHFT rolled out Idea Drop and launched an innovation initiative to gather views from their staff across the organisation, as well as from other stakeholders, to inform their refreshed strategy for 2020 and beyond.
“The whole idea of this is that we really encourage everyone to have a voice. Everyone to share their thinking, everyone to share their thoughts. And that’s why Idea Drop is a really good platform for us.”
Roisin Fallon-Williams, CEO
Watch the video below to find out how Idea Drop is driving innovation in healthcare and why their staff members are so excited about it.
The Results
Idea Drop has been instrumental in driving this initiative forward by launching a number of challenges and crowdsourcing 548 ideas from BSMHFT staff, enabling more than 5,000 interactions with staff who offered their feedback by adding “comments” and “ratings” and by “favouriting” colleagues ideas. This highlights the considerable level of employee engagement that the trust was able to achieve using Idea Drop.

As a result, BSMHFT was recognised at the NHS Communicate Awards for engaging their staff in the creation of the trust’s new strategy.

Watch the video below to hear directly from CEO Roisin Fallon-Williams and John Travers, Internal Communications and Engagement Lead at BSMHFT, about Idea Drop’s role in developing the new strategy, and how they envisage Idea Drop supporting them with their future plans to embed an innovative culture more widely across the trust.
Testimonial from Roisin Fallon-Williams, CEO, BSMHFT
“I want us to be able to think about some of the challenges we’ve got and ask people’s views about what would make a difference to those and how might we tackle them”
Roisin Fallon-Williams, CEO, BSMHFT
In this video, Roisin talks about the power of Idea Drop and how it’s going to enable a different type of working across the whole organisation. Find out why Roisin chose Idea Drop as the partner of choice and what the future holds for their innovation initiative.
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