What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Based in the YH Improvement Academy I have worked with a Community Interest Company – NIFTY Sustainability – to consider how the pandemic has created shifts in people’s perspectives and how these can be translated into practice in a workplace. Shifts include understanding what makes us happy,  healthy and cohesive in a community, what makes us vulnerable, and also appreciating the things we need to nurture and grow – community, natural spaces – and the ways we need to do it – relationships, appreciating diversity, connections, time.  We are influenced by ‘Build Back Better‘ as an example of groups and organisations coming together in response to this shift.  It includes teachers, healthcare workers, students and campaigning organisations who want to capitalise on this shift and spread awareness and action into all sectors of our lives.  We are particularly interested in what these shifts mean for the notion of healthcare improvement.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This shift is unsettling: it questions how things have always been done and draws attention to personal impacts and influence.  To help people work through these tensions and generate positive change, NIFTY Sustainability and I have outlined an ‘activist workplace change’ model.  It combines principles of PDSA,  organisational learning and peer support, with concepts of sustainable development (e.g. systems, resilience, equality & ecology).

We will:

1) coach 10 volunteers from across the health sector (ideally Qs) to pilot the model to achieve ‘system change’ goals that are important to them e.g. a GP/CCG manager seeking to use social prescribing to support positive mental health through natural spaces, or a senior manager of a hospital Trust seeking to build new partnerships for health across their community.

2) refine the model and develop training materials that can be used by Quality Improvers seeking to contribute to positive system change.

How will the project be delivered?

A Project Management & Delivery Team (PMDT) will comprise:

1) Claire Marsh: Quality Improvement coaching; facilitation; health services change management; NHS sustainability.

2) NIFTY Sustainability (Claire Bastin & Jen Dyer): sustainable development research, evaluation and practice; organisational and personal change; training and education.

3) Administrator (Improvement Academy team member):  online events coordination; project administration; communications.

‘Critical friends‘ (Beverley Slater, Director of the YH Improvement Academy and one or two others) will meet with the PMDT at the start, middle and end of the project to devise indicators, review and evaluate impact of the model.

The model will be piloted with 2 cohorts of 5 people (members of health community across the UK).  Each cohort will receive two interactive, inspiring online workshops focusing on resilient, healthy systems.  They will set their own change ideas at workshop 1, coming back to reflect in workshop 2.  In between sessions participants can access individual telephone and email support.

How is your project going to share learning?

Through the evaluation component of this project, participants will be supported to capture and share their individual change achievements.

The evaluation  will also capture learning about the model itself so that the PMDT can use this pilot to refine for wider use.  A creative designer will work with the PMDT and participants  to co-design and publish training materials for its wider use.  Whilst we cannot predict the precise format of these, we anticipate these to include a ‘creative-style’ short video outlining the model; case studies and stories from the pilot; accessible visuals of frameworks and tools for understanding influence and action within complex systems.

These will be made available on Websites (YH Improvement Academy and NIFTY Sustainability) and will be shared at relevant networking events such as Q.

We will use these pilot cohorts as the basis to build an ongoing network for further developing this model and training package.