NHS Southend and NHS Castle Point & Rochford CCGs is utilising a mobile application to empower staff to share their innovative ideas for quality improvements directly with senior management.
The CCGs were the first nationally to be selected to carry out a 12-week pilot of the ImproveWell platform.
The platform was introduced to primary care provides across the CCGs to facilitate shared best practice, engage staff in continuous improvement, and streamline the communication of feedback for primary care providers to the CCGs, ultimately strengthening the GP Practices’ sense of support from the Primary Care Team.
Andrea Bann, Primary Care Development Manager for NHS Southend and NHS Castle Point and Rochford CCGs “With the NHS facing ever increasing systemic pressures, the need to continually drive forward quality improvements is essential.”
“Taking part in this pilot was an exciting opportunity for us to drive forward our quality improvement objectives and to encourage staff to provide fresh and innovative ideas, to support continuous quality improvement.”
“We have already realised several benefits from this pilot and look forward to seeing the improvements it will ultimately bring for patient outcomes.”
The CCG said the platform has helped to improve communication and support the CCGs’ initiatives to address workload pressures in primary care through both the ideas generated and collaborative implementation.
During the 12-week pilot, every idea that was suggested was implemented, with 62% of these being “easy to implement”, and 46% considered “high impact ideas”.
Of the ideas submitted, 77% could also directly make it easier for staff to do their job, 54% would save staff time, and 38% focused on reducing errors. One such idea was to standardise blood tests for routine monitoring of chronic conditions. By working with the medicines management team, they were able to identify and prioritise long term conditions, then link in NICE guidance to develop a SystmOne Template for release across primary care.
As another example, as a direct output from a staff idea submitted to the ImproveWell platform, the joint CCGs set up a practice manager forum using a social media messaging app, connecting and facilitating better and quicker communication between the GP practices. This forum has become a place to ask questions of peers, share information and discuss issues, improving quality of care and facilitating the standardisation of processes across the eight localities to improve the services received by circa 374,000 patients.
Practice Manager at Valkyrie Surgery, Southend, Debbie Johnson “The communication between our CCG and the practice was already good, especially with primary care managers, but the mobile app has enabled us to be more proactive about informing the CCG of ideas for improvements. The way it works, it allows the CCG time to consider, plan and to act, on ideas for possible future processes. It also enables the practice to follow the progress of the idea at all stages until implementation.”
“A particular highlight for me was having the opportunity to meet with the CCG for a day, to show them how a large practice operates and to give an insight into the day-to-day challenges we face. This resulted in positive improvement ideas being successfully put in place.”
“Thanks to the pilot scheme and the mobile app we have established a new clinical system forum and user group in the practice, to proactively review and address any issues that may arise with our clinical booking system (SystmOne). This means the practice is now sufficiently informed to be able to liaise with the provider of the system about possible future developmental ideas, to benefit staff and our patients.”
