Jason Nicol
Head of Wellbeing, Culture and Development
NHS Grampian
Scotland
Biography
- Head of Wellbeing, Culture and Development, NHS Grampian
- Responsible for leading and supporting a newly forming service bringing together staff wellbeing, organisational development, learning and development and staff experience functions for NHS Grampian.
- Interested in leading and creating conditions for systems leadership approaches to thrive within complex health and social care systems
- 2018 GenerationQ Fellow
Jason is currently the Head of Wellbeing, Culture and Development for NHS Grampian. He began his career as a physiotherapist, before moving into roles in risk management, health care governance and senior operational roles. He has worked in NHS Grampian since 1996, and as an senior operational leader for the last 12 years until July 2023 when he moved into his current role.
Jason is responsible for leading and supporting the strategic approaches to staff wellbeing, organisational culture and workforce development approaches through a relational leadership approach; as well as for adopting and promoting an ethos of continuous improvement within an evolving integrated health and social care system.
Jason is committed to transforming the way in which our pathways, places and culture evolve in Grampian, across health and social care, including primary and secondary care. He most recently focussed on the whole system redesign of the older peoples pathway as a pathway transformation 'pathfinder' process of redesign. This involved identifying the current way in which the complex system operated, and facilitating a cross-agency redesign of this pathway to become a fit-for-purpose approach for the future. He explains how the GenerationQ fellowship helped him with this ambitious improvement project: ‘This was a significant scale of improvement, but one that I could sense was ripe for developing in the local context, given policy drivers for change, local conditions seeking change and resource provision to support transformational change.’
The multi-agency spread of the GenerationQ fellowship was of particular interest to Jason, as he found this ‘invaluable in challenging my perspective and in building effective cross-agency networks’. Jason said the experience: ‘hugely improved my self-awareness as a leader, and awareness of my own organisational context which further improved my personal effectiveness, both within my area of responsibility and on a wider, whole-system basis.’
Q Exchange ideas
Proactive Home Team; Enablement approach, reducing discharge delays
In response to hospital flow pressures, providers do not have capacity to meet demand for care at home; a new ‘Proactive Home Team’ will reduce care need via earlier/intensive intervention.
Blog posts
Stop! Collaborate and listen: how relational leadership can improve outcomes
How can multi-disciplinary teams learn from challenging and unexpected experiences that involve differing understandings of their respective areas of clinical care responsibility? Jason Nicol shares his learning from a recent debrief process, aimed at supporting learning.
Meet the 3000th New Member: Jason Nicol
Jason Nicol, Head of Service at NHS Grampian / Aberdeen City Health and Social Care Partnership, becomes the 3000th Q member. Here he tells us about his improvement journey and why he joined Q.
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External links
Areas of interest
- Acute care
- Analytics and data
- Collaboration and networking
- Commissioning
- Digital technology
- Disability
- Efficiency and productivity
- Emergency medicine
- End of life care
- Funding and sustainability
- Improvement research
- Integrated care
- Leadership
- Long-term conditions
- Older people
- Patient and public involvement
- Patient experience
- Person-centred care
- Quality improvement
- Quality of care
- Social care
- Workforce
Groups
- Third sector
- Impact and power of storytelling in health
- Psychological Safety in Health and Social Care
- Network Weaving
- Culture of Continuous Improvement
- Sustainable Healthcare
- Liberating Structures in healthcare
- Improving Joy in Work
- Measurement for Improvement
- Organisational Resilience & Safety-II
- Making use of patient experience
- Lean Healthcare
- Urgent and Emergency Care
- Primary Care
- Co-production
- Quality Improvement and the wellbeing of the workforce
- Complexity Approaches to support Quality Improvement