Chief Executive Fortnightly Blog to NHS Orkney Staff – 18 March 2024
Message for All NHS Orkney Staff
Dear Team Orkney
Launching Team Orkney – Improving Together
NHS Orkney is a special organisation, as is our relationship with our local community.
Our goal – as Team Orkney – is to listen to and act on feedback from our patients, community, and staff (putting people first in all we do), to be ambitious for our future and in doing so put clear plans in place that enable us to further improve care and services for our patients and community year-on-year.
Over the last 12-months we’ve begun our improvement journey which is different to anything that has gone before. This has seen new foundations being laid so that we can ensure we have an exciting and sustainable future. The areas we have focused on as part of this work include:
- Improving organisational culture (including through visible and compassionate leadership and living our values)
- Leadership stability (we now have a fully substantive Executive Team)
- Strengthened approach to risk management and governance (we have updated and streamlined our Corporate Risk Register and have a new Senior Leadership Team in place in response to staff feedback so that we are making transparent and clinically led decisions. We have also reviewed our operational governance arrangements so that we apply as much energy to the operational arm of our governance as we do our assurance arm)
- Improving operational and financial performance (we have better grip on how we are overseeing, scrutinising, and improving our performance in all domains and are beginning to better use data to drive improvements)
I reinforced the priorities and next steps in our improvement journey when I published my 100-Day report (August 2023). I was clear that in response to your feedback there were a number of things we needed to do next if we were to move forward and on to the next chapter of our improvement journey, which were:
- Investing in upskilling Team Orkney so that you feel better equipped and empowered to lead change
- Creating a safety-first, learning, and continuous improvement culture
- Accelerating the digitisation of our organisation
We’ve made good strides since Summer 2023 in each of these areas. Being escalated for our deteriorating financial performance in November 2023 has acted as a catalyst for accelerating the many changes that were already well underway. I see this as a positive, including creating an Integrated Improvement Hub (bringing quality, digital and financial improvement under a single umbrella) and starting to invest in upskilling staff in Quality Improvement and leadership skills so that we set you and your teams up to succeed. More on training and learning opportunities for Team Orkney to follow.
Let’s be honest
If we are all honest, there are changes and improvements we can all make that will further improve standards of care and our services for our patients and community. Improvement is a continuous process, it never stops. Even the highest performing organisations are continuously learning, improving, and innovating to ensure standards are maintained and improved. This is the culture I want us to create here at NHS Orkney and why now is the right time for us to launch our new organisation-wide ‘Team Orkney – Improving Together Programme’.
This is an all-encompassing improvement programme spanning: quality and safety, digital, operational, and financial improvement.
It will help us to have a single approach to improvement across NHS Orkney and I’m excited to get started so we can begin to focus on improvement in all we do.
We will prioritise our main projects year-on-year – but we want change and improvement to be happening at all levels of our organisation in time, no matter how big or small.
There are opportunities to improve standards of care and our services – including productivity and efficiency in some areas, and we will use data (including benchmarking) to determine where these opportunities are. We have set up 12 key workstreams to get us started with our Team Orkney – Improving Together programme – which are:
- Cancer
- Diagnostics
- Length of Stay (flow)
- Outpatients
- Pharmacy
- Theatres
- Social Care and Community
- Digital Transformation
- Estates and Facilities
- Finance
- Workforce
- Procurement
Each workstream has an Executive Lead and Delivery (Operational) Lead which is supported by a Finance and HR lead. This is a team sport and will help us to move towards more cross team and Multi-Disciplinary Team working, another feature which was at the heart of my 100-day report.
If you would like to get involved in any of these workstreams, please get in touch with our Improvement Team. We will provide regular updates on our progress in each of these areas, with a focus on the improvements we are making for our patients and staff.
Bright ideas
You know your areas of work better than anyone else and therefore what would need to be different to improve your service. We want to hear your ideas for improvement (no idea is too small) and we will support you to explore it further and implement it.
To help us to do so, we are launching our Bright Ideas scheme – so you can send your ideas to the Improvement Team and we’ll support you to follow these up and make them happen.
Some ideas won’t be a success, and this is entirely normal. What’s important though is that we try them and if they don’t work out, we’ll stop and try something different. The culture I want to create here is one where making mistakes or something not turning out as we hoped it would, is completely OK. It’s how we respond to these things and learn that’s important to me.
We’ll pick an idea of the month and share this in our communications updates.
Blether Together
We’re Improving Together Team Orkney (recognising we are one team), and if we blether together and share good practice and ideas and improvements, this will put us in good stead for creating the safety-first, learning, and continuous improvement culture we aspire to. Everything we do is about improvement and via our Blether Together sessions, we will help Team Orkney to share the great ideas and improvements we are starting to see across the organisation.
Take care.
Laura Skaife-Knight
Chief Executive