What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme?

Knowledge-rich organisations like the NHS struggle with knowledge, experience and information flow across and between the departments and Trusts. Staff struggle to identify, find, and locate the right knowledge, learning, assets and information. Our organisations haemorrhage knowledge and experiences with every staff member who leaves. We currently have no way to collate, share and build on each other’s knowledge, to harvest codifiable knowledge and make it accessible. This wastes time and resources as knowledge is lost, duplicated or missed. The right knowledge, easily  accessible and clearly signposted will help resolve avoidable errors.

By linking, and making accessible, organisational and individual knowledge and learning we create an environment that encourages better outcomes and more sustainable change.

What does your project aim to achieve?

A sustainable, renewable, digital-source of local intelligence that can inform decision making, planning and strategy. Connecting all NHS organisations and individuals across the Dorset economy, with the potential to expand by working with academic institutions. By building a knowledge and learning region, we can search, identify, access and share intelligence in any format.

This will make space for greater interaction, collaboration and networking across the region. Using and building on our collective knowledge and experience, to reduce waste on duplications and reinventing the wheel, whether that be in creating policies or initiating QI projects. It will also make it easier for students who move between placements to find who they need to know, what they need to know and how to become part of the knowledge sharing community.

How will the project be delivered?

Scoping and researching potential platforms and how can they be adopted, modified or redesigned to achieve the required platform functionality, alongside NHS IT and web designers.

There have been successful initial discussions with different organisations across the region to map interest and willingness to collaborate and be part of the project, across Dorset NHS organisations and universities.

For the project we will have a scoping period, identifying the organisations for the initial intelligence pooling; identify champions, reviewers, and the lead within each organisation; evidence and horizon scanning to identify similar projects that we can learn from. We will agree on sets of intelligence we need to collate and how, and work with IG leads on information governance, data protection, etc.,.

Selecting the platform developer; creating a prototype, development, testing, & debugging. Finally launching across participating organisations and welcoming organisations to sign up, and monitoring platform implementation and usage for sustainability.

How is your project going to share learning?

As a multi-modal, searchable, peer-reviewed platform, information will include profiles, achievements, projects, documentation, policies, procedures, guidelines, training learning from incidents; the assets developed across each organisation. On the clinical side, it can include anonymised cases, procedures, treatments, etc.

The multi-modality allows anyone to share knowledge, via text, video, audio, vlogs, etc, using hashtags and smart forms encompassing different modes and categories.

Profiles will identify who has the skills you need, projects and training, reducing duplications and encouraging collaboration. The platform will host libraries of talks from our experts training, pictures/videos of projects or cases, procedures and treatments, creating a repository of evidence-based best practice from our own community. Including policies, procedures, guidelines, reports, etc., allows organisations to learn from each other, adopt, adapt or standardise.

Finally it will link to a searchable repository of organisational and staff publications, theses and dissertations, case reports, impact case studies, systematic reviews etc.