Introducing
Kirsty Vale, Trainee Advanced Clinical Practitioner – Urgent Community Response.
Stephanie Hubbard, Trainee Advanced Clinical Practitioner – Community Respiratory.
Kirsty and Steph are a year into their quality improvement initiative and wanted to share the work they have undertaken so far and their experiences to date.
Can you tell us about your QI initiative and how it came about?
We had had discussions within the advanced practice team and identified that staff satisfaction had appeared to have declined within the service. Our recent staff survey results highlighted this was an issue providing us with evidence to support our discussions. We had already been talking about a QI initiative that focused on staff, rather than our patients, which we have done in the past, this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to do this and an issue that could benefit other areas within the Trust too.
We launched our initiative during QI Week last year (Sept 2023), this started with a service wide questionnaire, asking what appreciation meant to them and how they would like to receive appreciation and would they like to be involved in the initiative. We were overwhelmed with the response, and it provided us with a great insight into what it meant to our colleagues and how they would like to receive it. Staff from the service line came forward as wanting to support the work we were doing; a working party was formed working alongside our service’s culture team. Regular meetings were set up where we looked at the key themes that arose from the questionnaire which provided us with different work steams, enabling us to work closely with our colleagues. In doing this, suggestions were made in how to potentially improve staff satisfaction.
You are now a year into your improvement initiative, where are you now?
It’s very exciting now, along with our colleagues we have narrowed down potential ideas in which to improve staff satisfaction. One in particular is the development of our slogan ‘it costs nothing to say Thank You’. A member of our comms team who is also part of the culture change team is designing posters and thank you slips to give to colleagues.
What are your next steps?
We are looking for an area within our service line in which to pilot the slogan and thank you slips. Doing our own PDSA, we will evaluate the feedback, make any tweaks we need to and pilot again, with the aim of rolling out service wide, then Trust Wide. Watch this space.
What are your reflections over the last year? Do you have any advice for others embarking on an improvement initiative?
Remember you will be juggling your workload whilst doing your QI initiative, but having a clear plan to move forward was really helpful to us, even if you have to move the goalposts. Give yourself grace with timescales!
Ensure you network and get your face out there! It has been great to engage with staff we may not have had the opportunity to meet without this project. We spoke to our domestic staff, who said they had never been involved in anything like this before.
From this, identify your key people/stakeholders and get them involved from the start (bribery with sweet treats always works!). Everyone has different skill sets, being able to play to each other’s strengths has enabled us to delegate, which has really lightened the load.
Reach out to the Academy, their advice and assistance has been invaluable, their support with networking has been key.
You are really not alone; QI projects are certainly not as daunting as they may seem. They are doable alongside your role, you make the time, however small it is. QI is something that can be done by anyone at any level with the right support!