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

We are working with colleagues across our Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) health and care system with the aim to improve the health and wellbeing of our staff by growing our culture of civility and respect where people feel safe, happy and supported at work.

As part of our journey, we worked collaboratively to explore the ways in which we could implement a digital solution (Your Voice) that could enhance the reporting of incidents of bullying and harassment across our Integrated Care System (ICS).  This work formed one of our seven priorities (2021-22) as part of our LLR System People Plan and was enabled by our Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Taskforce.

Listening to our people we want to enhance our existing support with a web platform, available 24 hours, 365 days a year in order to encourage reporting from all our staff especially seldom heard groups and improved access for shift workers.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project aims to create a system-wide online reporting tool for staff to report experiences of harassment, victimisation, and discrimination. Your Voice will provide staff working across the LLR health care system with access to an online reporting tool that allows them to:

• Report an incident for themselves or someone else
• Make a report anonymously
• Report incidents where they experience or witness discrimination, harassment, victimisation and bullying  – including abusive behaviours of other colleagues, patients, and visitors
• Access online support information, contacts and advice
• Provide LLR organisations with an integrated management information system and to monitor the numbers of incidents, analyse themes and actions whilst adhering to information governance policies and procedures

The benefits from this will be that staff can report incidents in the way they feel most comfortable with increased opportunities and access for seldom heard groups of staff to feel safe to report and get support.

How will the project be delivered?

This project will be hosted on the LLR ICS Academy website and will be available to LLR health care staff (including bank staff), volunteers, and students on clinical placements. In the first phase of its implementation, the following organisations will be able to access Your Voice:

• University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
• Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust
• LLR NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups

Other LLR System Wide partners may be able to access the Your Voice tool in the future after initial implementation and review takes place.

Working with Culture Shift, this project will use the learning from Universities (such as Manchester, Warwick, UCL) to successfully implement Your Voice as an intervention supporting and enhancing our current practice and our Active Bystander Programme (ABP).

We are working in collaboration with NHSE’s National Civility and Respect team and Culture Shift to establish rapid real world evaluation as part of the wider ABP work.

How is your project going to share learning?

We are sharing our learning through our LLR ICS Academy and will communicate our findings using our Active Bystander Programme collaboration with NHSE’s National Civility and Respect Team, our Health and Wellbeing Hubs, connecting with colleagues across our ICS systems.

We are keen to start a conversation with our Q community and create new connections for real world learning as we use a QI approach for this project more widely.

We are using social media as part of our generation of shared learning. See for example our podcast:  ‘Case study: changing workplace culture in the NHS, Aloma Onyemah’ https://insight.culture-shift.co.uk/ 

Underpinning all of our work is our people, and we will continue to engage and share ongoing learning with our staff networks (BAME, LGBTQ+, Asian and Women’s Networks, staff side) and our teams (Freedom to Speak Up Guardians, HR People Partners, Leaders and Managers across our system) amongst others.