The Black Country Local Maternity and Neonatal System has announced a three-year partnership with ImproveWell, a digital platform designed to use real-time feedback to identify areas for improvement, which will see the solution used in maternity services region-wide.
The platform provides an avenue for staff to provide their own ideas for service improvements, with a reported 80 percent of ideas put forward requiring zero funding, “providing a feasible way for NHS organisations to proactively make improvements”. Potential areas which may be targeted for improvement include employee retention, staff morale, and the sharing of best practice, enabling teams to “make immediate improvements and develop their own, new systems to continuously improve”.
Gemma Haselgrove, lead retention midwife at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, explained that band 5 midwives have been using ImproveWell to “capture how they feel”, enabling her to formulate trends with the aim of delivering them to the senior management team.
Additionally, Gemma shared that she has started to conduct exit interviews and stay conversations using the platform and generated trends from these sources too.
“Preceptorship and support have been highlighted as a trend,” Gemma noted. “We are working towards aligning length of preceptorship with our Black Country colleagues and are working on ways to improve the support we provide. I think ImproveWell has helped us to engage in a more effective and meaningful way.”
Black Country ICB has also shared plans for the roll-out of ImproveWell across emergency departments in its hospitals over the summer months, aiming to gather feedback to improve staff wellbeing, quality of care and patient experience.
Also on digital and the workforce, the latest learning and education strategy from NHS Education for Scotland (NES), set to run until 2026, shares a number of plans with a digital focus including updating its digital platform and holding a review of existing data architecture.
Elsewhere, the latest meeting of the NHS England board emphasised the need to digitally support the workforce and highlighted increased digital maturity as a priority over the next two years.
