How virtual workplaces have helped the NHS collaborate
Encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration within a complex, multi-layered organisation - by Mark Rowland.
There’s nothing like a crisis to encourage innovation. NHS professionals have quite rightly been praised as the health service pulls together to deal with COVID-19. This is certainly not without its challenges – the service was already feeling the pressure when it came to budgets and resource – but the NHS is doing a great job of managing an unprecedented situation.
In the longer term, the NHS is likely to face more challenges like this. Not just from future pandemics, but from the increasing demand for services as a result of an ageing population. Factors such as poor diet and air quality will also have an impact. It’s never been more important for the NHS to do more with what it already has.
Innovation and transformation are not easy within the health service, however. As explored in the spring 2020 issue of Project journal, the NHS is a complex beast made up of many organisations. It can be extremely hierarchical and risk-averse. It needs the right conditions to innovate.
Creating the right (virtual) environment
Tammy Watchorn left the NHS last summer. She worked on driving innovation and change across NHS Scotland, also working with organisations such as NHS Health Education England. One of her biggest remits was to encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration between teams to find simple solutions to the issues the service was facing. One of her biggest successes was to introduce virtual working, through a system called Qube.
“We were able to bring people together to properly collaborate and align with each other,” she explains. We got rid of some of the hurdles associated with a very hierarchical, tightly governed, risk-averse, massively complex organisation. It lifted us out of that and actually allowed us to do what we needed to do.”
Watchorn slowly built up a network across NHS Scotland of teams using Qube to share ideas on a level playing field. It was not without its hurdles – it was met with resistance by some senior managers in certain departments and organisations – but it resulted in a number of success stories that proved the concept of virtual collaborative working.
Multidisciplinary teamwork for Scottish surgeons
Different teams within surgery across Scotland were collecting information from completely different sources and making clinical decisions based on that data. It meant that no teams were making decisions based on the same criteria, so they weren’t aligning. Each department also worked on different IT systems, and the assumption was that the IT systems would all have to be changed to a single system in order to implement meaningful change.
Watchorn solved the issue with a very quick project based around Qube. She brought the surgeons together on the platform for an hour a week for three weeks. The session would take place in the evening to ensure that all relevant parties could contribute.
In each session, the surgeons shared their experiences, agreed the core issue – the lack of data alignment – and the data they all needed to make effective decisions, provide the right aftercare, and deliver relevant reports.
“We developed a prototype, tested the prototype, made sure that everyone was happy, and they all implemented the changes locally, rather than changing their IT systems,” says Watchorn. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we had to sit around a table, because we would never have got them together. It also took all of the hierarchy away, so everyone could discuss it on a level playing field.”
The need for senior sponsorship
None of this would have worked without the sponsorship of senior leaders within those surgery teams. Senior sponsorship is crucial for these virtual collaborations to succeed, otherwise people can end up reverting back to the old ways of doing things. As the health service is so traditionally hierarchical, management can be wary of using collaborative tools that take that hierarchy away.
“It’s a real leveler, because it’s about collaboration,” says Watchorn. “It’s not about who is in charge. So that culture piece within the public sector can be a real blocker unless you have sponsors who are willing to push it through at a high level.”
Mid-level, frontline staff are much more likely to embrace this virtual collaborative approach to change projects – it gives them the option to share ideas and come to solutions that they wouldn’t usually have time for. These projects, as demonstrated by Watchorn’s surgeon project, are also quick to implement and are often driven by the simplest solution.
“Mid-level nurses are often desperate for some help. They’re so busy and there’s not enough resource, they’re asked to do a million things, they have all of these different strategies that they have to deliver. They lapped it up because it gave them the tools and space that they needed to work out what to do.”
Watchorn now works at Pentacle – The Virtual Business School, sharing her knowledge with a variety of organisations, including within the NHS. “It’s important to remember that an app or a bit of software is not the solution – we need to start working in different ways as people.”
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