Discover the latest Solving Together blogs here.
This is a blog post from Suhailah Mohamed who is an Allied Health Professional (AHP) and Head of Practice and Workforce at the Royal College of Occupational Therapists
Like countless first generation British, third culture kids, my parents wanted me to become a doctor and I wanted nothing more than to make my parents proud.
So off I went selecting GCSEs and A-Levels courses with this career aspiration in mind. I managed to get an unconditional offer to study a BSc. in anatomy and physiology at Leeds University and continued to apply for a place to study medicine.
After unsuccessful applications to pretty much all medical schools in the UK, it feltlike the universe was signalling to me that I needed a plan B for my career. I was working as a Senior Consultant for a health and social care recruitment agency in London when I discovered and fell in love with the philosophy of Occupational Therapy.
The belief that we are social, active beings whose health and wellbeing is promoted by doing the activities that matter the most to us in life, resonated with me to my core. I studied an MSc. in Occupational Therapy at Brunel University and have been registered with the Health and Care Professions Council since 2017.
Retraining as an occupational therapist was by far the best career decision I made and is one that has opened a door of endless opportunities for me.
Upon graduating, I used the Royal College of Occupational Therapists’ Career Development Framework to harness the depth and breadth of my skills and experiences. This allowed me to market the full breadth of my talents to prospective employers.
This approach has helped me make the most of the plethora of career progression opportunities available to me and other Allied Health Professionals in the NHS. I was fortunate to be able to progress from a Band 5 Occupational Therapist to a Band 8d Head of Allied Health Professions within seven years of becoming a registered occupational therapist.
I have worked in an NHS Trust as Professional Development Lead for AHPs; I have coordinated fun projects with communities at their heart for an integrated care system; and have had the privilege of leading national programmes of work for the Allied Health Professions on behalf of NHS England.
I currently work at the Royal College of Occupational Therapists as Head of Practice and Workforce and have an ambition to set up my own consultancy business that brings together my cumulative knowledge, experience, capabilities and networks across the health and social care industry.
If you’re looking for a rewarding career, a career with endless opportunities with you firmly in the driving seat as the master of your destiny, look no further! An AHP career has everything on offer – it’s a universe of endless opportunities, waiting to welcome you with open arms!
Share your own story of joining the NHS to inspire others on their journey to a healthcare career.
Blog from Beverley Harden
Deputy Chief Allied Health Professions Officer, NHS England
So many of the careers and jobs within the NHS are invisible, what’s also invisible is that for so many a job turns into a career and the opportunity to self actualise.
I have just sat through a beautiful university graduation of science and medical related subjects - not one course led to a job, maybe a third of the room didn’t know what they were doing next, maybe a third were off to do an MSc that again led to no job but another year of fees. The other third - some with jobs, some to training into professions.
There was so much knowledge, learning, hope and passion in the room.
Imagine if many of them had found out about so many of the incredible jobs in health and care earlier in their career choices, imagine the assurance of work, the reduced debt and purpose alongside the joy of a university education?
The challenge is that at school they all knew what Biology etc was, so many would have tried to get places for medicine, dental, physio etc and when unsuccessful didn't know what else to do and so took a generic medical science subject to rethink.
It is so important school leavers (and everyone making career choices) have the chance to understand, try, discuss and learn about the different professions to see where they fit, where their passion could lie and what jobs/careers they could do. The choices are bewildering if one is not helped to navigate NHS careers.
We do our next generation a great disservice by not building this breadth of understanding.
However the REAL sadness was that even after three years of learning, a stones throw from the local hospital in a faculty of health and care programmes, the majority still did not know much more about the opportunities available to them.
We could do so much better.....
Join in the Student Attraction conversations on how we can attract more people to healthcare careers
In today's digital age, data plays a crucial role in shaping the future of healthcare. As the NHS continues to embrace technological advancements, the demand for skilled professionals who can navigate and analyse data is growing.
At the time of studying BSc Computer Science, I did not think I would have a career in the NHS. After university there was a difficult period where job prospects in the area I lived for a new graduate like me were slim within the technology world which is where I thought my degree would take me and I am sure many students today find themselves in a similar position.
After a few months of job searching I landed in a role in the then NHS Improvement through an agency, as a E Learning platform coordinator, the role was only for 6 months, but one thing led to another and I stayed on and have now worked in the NHS for 14 years. The NHS offered me plenty of learning and development opportunities through which I have been able to increase my skills and knowledge in healthcare and recently I have graduated with a MBA in healthcare.
Data has the power to transform healthcare by providing valuable insights into patient care, resource allocation, and health outcomes. As a Data Specialist in the NHS, my role has been to collect, analyse, and interpret data to drive evidence-based decision-making.
Throughout my years with the NHS I have had many opportunities to use my data skills, such as managing a data assurance project which involved verifying the data held on CRM for 7000 plus practices across England. The project was a success and led to the creation of 500 new contacts and 582 events.
I have also worked with large and complex programme data whilst working on the GP access programme to monitor and analyse the performance of the programme to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, ultimately enhancing the delivery of healthcare services within primary care.
Efficient resource allocation is crucial in the NHS to ensure that healthcare services are delivered in the most effective and cost-efficient manner. As a Data Specialist, I play a vital role in analysing data related to resource utilisation and service demand. By identifying areas of inefficiency and implementing data-driven solutions, areas of improvement can be identified.
An example of this is monitoring and analysing the pharmaceutical list data from across England, which involved collating data on each pharmacy, location, owner, opening times and enhanced services provided to be able to publish a national pharmaceutical list which was accurate at the time of publishing providing patients, general practice and the 111 service with accurate data.
Being a Data Specialist in the NHS is an exciting and rewarding role as you contribute to evidence-based decision-making, optimise resource allocation, enhance patient care, support policy development, and contribute to innovation and research.
As the NHS continues to embrace data-driven healthcare, expertise as a Data Specialist becomes increasingly valuable in ensuring quality healthcare for all making it even more crucial to have more data Specialists and experts coming into the organisation.
Share your own story of joining the NHS to inspire others explore a career in healthcare.
Blog from Paul Chapman MCSP DSA (csp)
Programme Manager – Education Reform (AHP), NHS England
How do we attract more people who are looking to change career to find their new role working in health?
During my 40 years as both a physiotherapist and working more broadly in the NHS, I have worked with a lot of extraordinary people.
Many of these people had a previous career not related to physiotherapy or healthcare. I really noticed what extra diversity they brought to the workplace. They had a wealth of transferable non-clinical skills. Those from the armed forces had skills such as teamwork punctuality and resilience, and those from the private sector were able to bring learning through different ways of working. They all helped to enhance and support staff and the service to look at patient care delivery through a wider lens.
The recent pandemic has resulted in the highest number of people looking to change career. Recent research by NHS England included interviewing people from non-clinical jobs who had decided to change career and become an Allied Health Professional. The reasons for the change were varied. ‘I wanted to make an impact on people’s lives’, ‘I wanted to use transferable skills from my past career’, ‘I want to use my technical skills to help people’, ‘greater job security’, or ‘a job that fitted around family life’. All reason for change.
Diversity is essential if we are going to meet the needs of the population and develop a sustainable workforce. There is a clear drive to ensure we achieve diversity based on protected characteristics and this is always at the forefront of recruitment campaigns. But do we miss other areas of diversity such as lived experience or skills from other sectors? Do we embrace the diversity career changers bring?
We need to ensure we attract those looking to use their existing skills, ensuring those changing careers can bring their lived experience and it will be valued by the health service.
Get involved in the Student Attraction conversations on how we can attract more people to healthcare careers.
Blog from Julie Read, Physiotherapist, MCSP
Strategic Lead Clinical Expansion Programmes, NHS England
How can we attract people to a rewarding healthcare career? How can we encourage people to explore the many training opportunities on offer such as healthcare apprenticeships and degrees across the nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions?
We’re using the Solving Together platform to crowdsource ideas and solutions on how we can attract people both to healthcare careers and training opportunities such as apprenticeships and degree courses.
The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan has ambitious targets to increase the number of people working in the nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions. Sufficient interest and applications from students in healthcare roles is vital to growing the number of people working in our health service.
NHS services are also constantly evolving to meet patient need. New ways of working, services and technologies are constantly being developed and we need a high-quality workforce to deliver them.
I am a physiotherapist (one of the allied health professions) by background. I didn’t get the expected A levels grades and went through UCAS Clearing to start my training. As I was growing up, I did not fully appreciate the range of training and career opportunities that the NHS offers and it wasn’t until I joined the NHS that my eyes were fully opened.
I joined the NHS because I wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. I have been lucky to be able to do this in many roles, whether that’s working clinically, and supporting people to recover and rehabilitate, or developing colleagues and watching them achieve great things. I also have some of the best memories and friendships from the teams I have worked with, it really is more than just a job in the NHS.
So how can you help?
Maybe you are thinking of joining the NHS. Maybe you have never considered an NHS job. Maybe you’re someone who helps people with their career decisions. Maybe you’re currently in training for an NHS career or already work in health and social care. Whatever your situation, we would like to hear your ideas and solutions to make our careers more attractive to you and others.
We also want to hear about any engaging or innovative ways you have seen from other sectors or industries to attract people so we can learn and innovate.
I’m really looking forward to reading your ideas, experiences and solutions to these conversations on the Solving Together platform (to join in the conversations, you need to register, which takes just a moment).
Your insights will be used for planning in future years and developing tools to support the future workforce. This will help ensure that we can continue to provide high quality care to patients for many years to come.
Too many people who were medically ready to be discharged from hospital experienced delays in leaving hospital; we asked what should always happen for every person in hospital who is ready for discharge to be able to go home earlier in the day. Amongst the 132 ideas and experiences that were shared, people said a common cause for delays in leaving hospital was waiting for medicines to take home. An action area that emerged from the challenges was volunteers supporting hospital discharge by taking medicines to a person’s home if the medicines are not ready before the person leaves hospital.
Solving Together is pleased to share news about a service happening in Barnsley Hospital, where they have successfully launched a ‘Pick up and Deliver’ service. It will support individuals being discharged from hospital by transporting medication to their homes. This enables them to return home earlier, rather than waiting in hospital for their prescriptions to be ready. Discharge staff feel that it both improves patient flow by getting patients home quicker but also saves bed days by reducing the number of patients still waiting on-ward past 5pm.
Graham is a Pick Up and Deliver Volunteer at Barnsley Hospital – in this short video he explains how the process works.
Jacqueline Howarth, Operational Manager of RightCare Barnsley said: “We have found the Pick Up and Deliver service to be incredibly helpful.... The service is available seven days a week and is highly responsive, which is fantastic”. Read more in the full article in the Integrated Care Journal.
Volunteers benefit, too – Graham has shared his experience on the NHS Care Volunteer Responders website, saying “The most rewarding part is witnessing the gratitude on the faces of patients and staff...it’s as though I’m delivering a present. Being a volunteer responder is a satisfying and rewarding way to give back to others.”
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Hospital Discharge challenges on Solving Together; you can read the ideas and experiences here.
We’re preparing new sprints on Solving Together and look forward to sharing more information with you soon.
NHS England recently announced that hundreds of thousands more people a month will have the option to refer themselves for key services such as help with incontinence, podiatry, or hearing tests without needing to see a GP, as part of the NHS primary care access recovery plan. You can read more about this announcement here.
In spring 2023 we asked for your ideas and experiences about how we could make it easier for people to refer themselves to community health services, without the need to see their GP or other healthcare professional first.
A brilliant 240 ideas were posted about increasing self-referrals – a huge thank you to everyone who took part in self-referral to community health services on Solving Together by sharing their ideas and experiences, voting, commenting, engaging via social media or sharing through their networks. You can read the ideas and experiences here.
It's great to see that even more people will now have the option to refer themselves to key services without needing to see a GP first.
Thank you again, and we look forward to seeing you on the platform again for future sprints.
If you took part in the Elective Care Recovery challenges on Solving Together, you may remember that a common thread amongst the 392 ideas and experiences shared in nearly 100,000 interactions was that people said they want to know what is going on and to have more knowledge and control over when things are going to happen to them. 'Managing my own care journey, with support if I need it' was one of three Big Ideas to emerge from these challenges.
The National Outpatient Recovery and Transformation Programme are piloting the use of online forms (also known as e-forms or digital questionnaires), in a small number of trusts to evaluate the impact and scalability of this technology across NHS secondary care.
An online form is a digital tool which enables people to provide clinical information about their medical condition securely to their clinician. This supports clinicians to gather the necessary information to help people see the right clinician, first time, and gives the person more choice in how they receive care.
There's a workspace for the pilot on Future NHS to share resources and learnings with trusts participating in the national online forms pilot, and others who are interested in implementing an online forms solution in their service. You can find the Future NHS space here.
It's great to see this progressing - thank you to everyone who was involved by sharing their ideas and experiences.
You can read the ideas shared as part of the Elective Care Recovery challenges on Solving Together here.
We're looking forward to seeing even more people join future Solving Together sprints - make sure you're signed up to the platform so you can take part!
Bethany Golding shares her lived experience of mental illness and community mental health services.
I have a severe mental illness – bipolar disorder. When I was younger, though, I was diagnosed with anorexia, depression and anxiety. I received a great deal of support via community mental health services during my teenage years and early 20s.
Getting the right diagnosis at a young age is important and I would like to see earlier diagnoses for people with bipolar disorder so that the best possible support can be provided from a young age.
Nearly 70% of respondents to a Bipolar UK survey said that they had received a diagnosis of depression prior to one for bipolar disorder.
According to the research by Bipolar UK: ‘Clinicians say there are also a number of other reasons for the delay, including a lack of psychiatrists, diagnostic complexity, overlap with other mental health conditions, people not presenting severe symptoms to primary care, people not recognising the significance of previous periods of hypomania and a reluctance to get a bipolar diagnosis which still carries a stigma.’
I have a severe mental illness – bipolar disorder. When I was younger, though, I was diagnosed with anorexia, depression and anxiety. I received a great deal of support via community mental health services during my teenage years and early 20s.
Getting the right diagnosis at a young age is important and I would like to see earlier diagnoses for people with bipolar disorder so that the best possible support can be provided from a young age.
Nearly 70% of respondents to a Bipolar UK survey said that they had received a diagnosis of depression prior to one for bipolar disorder.
According to the research by Bipolar UK: ‘Clinicians say there are also a number of other reasons for the delay, including a lack of psychiatrists, diagnostic complexity, overlap with other mental health conditions, people not presenting severe symptoms to primary care, people not recognising the significance of previous periods of hypomania and a reluctance to get a bipolar diagnosis which still carries a stigma.’
My mental health issues cost me a lot as a young person. I missed my grades for Cambridge University because of a period of severe mental illness during my final exams. However, I spent a fantastic three years at the University of East Anglia, and then two years for a Master’s degree at the University of York, during both of which I was able to access mental health support services.
The support I received from community mental health services for depression and anxiety as a young person was excellent. Mind provided me with a course of therapy, and later on I was able to access counselling from my university services. During my MA, I was able to access a course of CBT through the NHS which I found genuinely life changing. The CBT gave me access to coping strategies and skills which have stayed with me throughout my adult life. I also discovered other things which helped me through my own research, such as using an S.A.D. lamp and taking vitamin D in the winter to ease seasonal depression. The Bipolar UK community has since also played a part in securing my wellbeing.
A wise woman once said to me: “If the issue lies in the community, then so does the solution”. These words really resonated with me and continue to resonate, and I think we cannot underestimate the importance of mental health services working with the third sector and with people with lived experience to improve the services that they offer.
I am proud that despite my mental health condition – which does not define me – I am able to work full time in a meaningful role for the NHS, and to volunteer for an LGBT charity in West Yorkshire. I genuinely don’t think this would’ve been possible without the support I received as a young person to help me develop my coping strategies. I am therefore extremely grateful to all those services and absolutely passionate about ensuring that we hear from a wide range of voices in our work to improve access to children and young people’s community mental health services.
Blog from Dr Vin Diwakar, Medical Director for Transformation, NHS England
Once people no longer need hospital care, their home or a care home is the best place for them to continue their recovery. However, unnecessary delays in being discharged from hospital are a problem that too many people experience: every day fewer than half of people who are ready to leave hospital return home, or to a care home.[1]
We want to make sure that people who no longer need to be cared for in hospital leave in a safe, effective, and timely way. I would like to invite you to share your ideas on this question: what should always happen to ensure people go home from hospital earlier in the day and be heading #Home4Noon?
My recent personal experience of a stay in hospital highlights some issues that get in the way of people heading #Home4Noon: I was ready to be discharged at 9am, but I left at 5pm, having spent the day on the ward because of waiting for medicines I needed to take home. This meant someone in need of that bed that day was unable to use it.
People across the NHS – regions, systems, and providers of services - are currently working together on a range of initiatives to understand the reasons why people don’t always leave hospital when they are clinically ready; how we can work together to address the issues; as well as identifying and sharing where good work is already happening.
Heading #Home4Noon is one of the initiatives. People who are ready to be discharged from hospital should leave as early in the day as is possible, and ideally be heading #Home4Noon. This provides a better experience for the person receiving care because there is less waiting around in hospital, they will be arriving home during the daytime, and they can be settled into their home environment with everything from shopping to equipment that they will need already in place.
Heading #Home4Noon is also useful for those people who are waiting to come into hospital either for an operation, or following assessment in the emergency department. Being admitted earlier in the day means they too have a better experience because they are settled into the ward and their family can visit them.
There is a direct relationship between the percentage of patients who discharge and leave the hospital by noon and overcrowding and risks to patients and our staff in emergency departments and acute units in the evening and at night.
As an acute clinician, I also know that organising our services to achieve heading #Home4Noon is not as easy as it sounds!
I’d like to invite anyone with an interest in making sure people heading #Home4Noon becomes the norm rather than an ambition: do join in here: https://solvingtogether.crowdicity.com/ There are three challenges: People, Teams, and Organisations, including systems. Please visit the challenge area to read more about these challenges, and share your ideas. Your ideas can include examples of good practice, innovative ideas, or experiences of care; I am very much looking forward to reading them.
Heading #Home4Noon is part of #SolvingTogether which is an approach to capture, assess and test learning and ideas that can support the priorities for health and care; it is part of a suite of interventions relating to the delivery of transformation led by Tim Ferris, Director of Transformation of NHS England. It is doing this by mobilising the people who know the most (those delivering and receiving care and leading services), making them fair, accessible and inclusive for all.
The #SolvingTogether “crowdsourcing” platform is a regionally-led and centrally supported initiative to capture, assess, test and share ideas on a range of issues affecting our NHS.
Heading #Home4Noon is part of the 100 Day Discharge Challenge, which aims to support trusts and systems to adopt 10 best practice initiatives to support hospital discharge. NHS and social care staff can access a range of resources to help them implement the initiatives in their own organisation on a new dedicated website.
Take part...have your say, let’s get #SolvingTogether and with your help we can get people heading #Home4Noon and #ImprovingDischarge
[1] https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/what-latest-data-tells-us-about-delayed-discharges#:~:text=An%20average%20of%2042.7%20per,42.2%20per%20cent%20last%20week.
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is a success” – Henry Ford.
Subscribed members of the Solving Together community already know how we crowdsource to gather input from thousands of people from diverse perspectives. You may have been involved in previous crowdsourcing challenges and saw the fantastic responses that were shared on the platform. We’re keen to invite others to take part and are asking for your help in growing our membership by sharing this information across your networks with people who may not yet be involved or know about Solving Together. Please encourage them to sign up.to become part of the Solving Together community.
Crowdsourcing enables people with different expertise and experience to come together, in an online space, and offer suggestions and solutions to current challenges. Using a crowdsourcing platform means that you can set up a variety of ‘challenges’ around themes relevant to your issue or campaign. It’s a diverse and inclusive process: people can post an idea or feedback on someone else’s idea at any time day or night during the campaign. The ability for people to vote on ideas on the platform helps rank and refine contributions, meaning the community’s collaborative effort help shape the next steps, rather than the traditional small group of senior decision makers. Every comment is read and responded too.
Bev Matthews, Solving Together’s Programme Director tells us more about Solving Together in this clip from the Agents Assemble podcast.
After the crowdsourcing closes, ideas and suggestions then move through the stages of the Solving Together Roadmap to be themed and tested before being implemented to improve services. You can read about three big ideas which were developed following this process for Elective Care Recovery.
This animation video explains more about how crowdsourcing works – and how crowdsourcing can create real change, rapidly, by generating ideas from the community.
A huge part of the success of any #SolvingTogether programme is the work of the community managers.
What are community managers? Well they’re the people who create energy, building the momentum with diverse groups who are taking part in the ideas stage of Solving Together.
We’ve all been there when you’ve come up with a great idea and then... tumbleweeds! It’s not a great feeling! What a community managers does is make those connections for the idea generator to find like minded people who can help bring the idea to life, they might link you to a similar project, or even add to the idea themselves.
It’s all about creating an open conversation where creativity and connections can thrive! They do this by using open language, questions to make you think and giving helpful tips and information there and then. They also bring new people into the project, sharing it with their own networks and encouraging others to do the same.
As the old saying goes - team work makes the dreamwork! One idea can ignite the fuse that sparks off others to share their thoughts, collaborate and give people courage to make their own contributions that can lead to big changes in Health and Care.
Community Management is a crucial piece of the Solving Together puzzle and the best part is - it’s fun! This role allows you to identify new opportunities, connect with people you may never have met before and stimulate exciting discussions that could lead to a big idea that could impact positive change for people who receive care throughout the country.
Does this sound like you? Why not contact : england.solvingtogether@nhs.net and get involved?
This post has been written by Kate Pound, Improvement Manager, Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST).
During the #SolvingTogether process, we have implemented the Design Thinking approach, which involves identifying the problem, gathering ideas for solutions from a crowd, and creating prototypes.
I love this methodology for two reasons.
Firstly, it prioritises the end users, allowing us to empathise with them and fully understand their challenges.
Secondly, I appreciate how this approach can be lighthearted and enjoyable, transforming a daunting taskinto a fun, engaging project of joy.
One tool that can be used in the prototyping phase is creating a press release. This helps teams consider how to sell their new concept to others and imagine its impact by asking some questions.
- What would we tell people about the concept?
- How would we explain the benefits?
- How would the service users react and what would they say?
- What would the impact of the solution be?
The teams could even make up some metrics to show what we imagine future success to look like. Ian McAllister famously used this tool in his role at Amazon, where he led user experience.
Once you've crafted your press release, it's a good idea to get some feedback and make any necessary tweaks. With those refinements in place, you'll be ready to write a compelling front-page story for a newspaper.
When it comes to designing your story, let your imagination run wild and think about what will really get readers excited about your amazing new idea. That's the key to making it a success and will help in its implementation.
"What work would you want to blend together to create greater improvements for your communities?"
This week, as the summer holidays get underway and lots of us are picking up the atlas or setting the satnav, at #Solving Together, we continue highlighting the Solving Together Roadmap. We’ve picked out some stages of our journey along this roadmap, to share with you.
Kate Pound,Improvement Manager in NHS England’s Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST) explores the question above “What work would you want to blend together to create greater improvements for your communities?" Kate tells us more in The Finest Blend.
On our platform Solving Together: In action (crowdicity.com) there’s lots more information about previous crowdsourcing challenges – come and have a look at what people are saying about the challenges relating to Community Health Service, Discharge and Elective Care.
As with all journeys, it’s important to have a starting point and a destination. We’re reminded of both in the #Solving Together podcast which features Tim Ferris, Director of Transformation, NHSEngland and Bev Matthews,Director of Solving Together, NHS England, discussing what #Solving Together means to them. Please share the link with your networks and encourage people to register to find out more.
Let’s keep Solving Together….
If you’d like to know more about other stages of theSolving Together Roadmap, or #Solving Togethergenerally, pleaseleave a comment on this post and we’ll respond.
Continuing the conversations and staying connected
We have a very activeinfluencing presence on social media. For the latest news and to stay connected with the Solving Together community, keep in touch through our channels: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net The Solving Together team hopes this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.
by Kate Pound, Improvement Manager, Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST)
taken from @gapingvoid on Twitter
This time last year #SolvingTogether was running an urgent and emergency care (UEC) crowdsourcing challenge. So many great ideas were put forward and they contributed to a themed analysis which then developed big ideas for testing around these key areas:
• Using technology to improve accessibility for people who receive care
• Finding the right urgent care service
• Increasing use of technology to improve urgent care
• Supporting ambulance services to work differently
• Sharing examples of good urgent care
A year later I’m now supporting systems in delivering their UEC recovery. When reading through the NHS England UEC Recovery Plan, it highlighted to me the importance of not creating silo working. The principle of #Solving Together is relevant at this stage too. If we took these ideas and blended them with the UEC recovery plan, could we create new opportunities? Would the wisdom of the crowd create diverse thinking and generate new ways of working together to improve care for everyone?
What work would you want to blend together to create greater improvements for your communities?
Do you wonder what happens to all the comments, suggestions and ideas that are shared during the crowdsourcing stage?
This week, we’d like to highlight the Solving Together Roadmap which reflects the full journey from planning the challenges, ideas captured at the crowdsourcing stage through testing and into implementation. We’ve picked out three stages to tell you more about.
Gillian Driscoll, Solving Together’s Community Mobilisation Lead, tells us about People and Communities Solving Together how important it is to create the right conditions before crowdsourcing begins to ensure people and communities are involved.
In her blog, Designing Together, Kate Pound, Improvement Manager in NHS England’s Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST) tells us more about the prototyping stage of the roadmap where we use learning to improve things. Kate shares with us Thomas Edison’s great quote which sums it up well "I have not failed; I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
An example of how new ideas are shared at the scale and spread stage is the creation of the Restoring NHS Services Inclusively space on the Health Inequalities Improvement Programme Future NHS page. This emerged from the crowdsourcing phase of Solving Together for elective care recovery. More than 8,000 people joined in the conversation generating 392 ideas from 100,000 interactions. Every single idea and comment have been reviewed by more than 30 champions who are supporting this work, led by regional NHS leads, including people with lived experience, national clinical directors, experts in health inequalities and system improvers. The page shares the outputs from a Data Driven Inclusive Elective Recovery event held earlier this year and provides a space for discussion, learning and building networks around health inequalities and elective care.
Let’s keep Solving Together….
If you’d like to know more about other stages of the Solving Together Roadmap , leave a comment on this post, to let us know which ones, and we’ll highlight them in a future edition.
Continuing the conversations and staying connected
We have a very active influencing presence on social media. For the latest news and to stay connected with the Solving Together community, keep in touch through our channels: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net
The Solving Together team hopes this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.
by Kate Pound, Improvement Manager, NHS England’s Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST)
At the heart of all prototyping is the user experience; if it's no good for the end users, then there's no point in the product or service! This is why throughout the #SolvingTogether work, lived experience is essential and given a high value of gold dust. Historically in health and care design, decisions are led from the top of an organisation where the power sits. Through prototyping and valuing lived experience, a power shift is essential from exclusive to shared, as seen in the chart below from Beyond Sticky Notes.
A prototype is the initial or preliminary model of a machine or product used as a basis for developing or copying other forms. It can also be used as a verb to describe the process of creating a prototype. Prototyping is a valuable technique used in design for quick development, testing, and learning. It should be a fun and inclusive process.
"I have not failed; I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - THOMAS EDISON.
Prototyping is about many things, but the concepts outlined in these quotes are critical to remember. Prototyping is about failing quickly and learning from those failures to improve things. Prototyping is all about iteration and evolving an idea to get to a final solution prototyping is also about making things to help communicate ideas, accelerate the conversation, and help others see your thoughts.
"Fail faster. Succeed sooner." - DAVID KELLEY
When starting prototyping, you are likely to have too many ideas about what and how the final design should look like In Design Thinking this is the second double diamond where you move from divergent to convergent ideas as you test and create, moving from your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to the final design.
"If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a prototype is worth 1000 meetings" - IDEO
Together, as we move forward in our efforts to solve problems, we have a unique opportunity to design innovative solutions that include diverse perspectives and voices. By listening to and collaborating with those who will benefit the most - our patients, their families, and our staff - we can create meaningful and impactful change.
by Gillian Driscoll, Community Mobilisation Lead at Solving Together
Hi I’m Gillian, as a newbie to the Solving Together team, I’d like to introduce myself. I usually work in the Public Participation team at NHS England, leading on the learning and support offer for people working in partnership with people and communities. I am loving the opportunity to learn more about the Solving Together programme approach and its ambitions. I now live and breathe it! I’m constantly looking at ways we can reach more people to get involved.
As you would expect from my background, I am interested in how Solving Together involves people and communities; not only how it reaches wider audiences but also how it delves deeper to work with people who aren’t fully represented, either in experiencing the worst health inequalities or people who aren’t yet part of the existing Solving Together community.
My work so far has been looking at the stage before the crowdsourcing starts. I’m interested in helping to create the right conditions through engagement strategies. There are great examples of the Solving Together team and programme teams working together with people and communities, with lived experience partners and with subject matter experts, to shape the challenges for crowdsourcing and then subsequently, to expand, test and spread big ideas.
One underpinning engagement principle which has significant impact is the way in which communities are brought together to be involved. It isn’t about Solving Together developing a new community; it’s about mobilising those who know the most (those receiving care and those delivering it) to give those communities a way to share their ideas and contribute to improvement together.
I’m looking forward to being part of bringing together communities for future challenges. Please encourage your communities to sign up to the platform so they can find out more when a new challenge is announced and get involved.
“Solving Together is about generating improvements to health services by harvesting great ideas from anybody who wants to get involved based on strong co-production principles” Mark Agathangelou, Lived Experience Partner, Solving Together
We know that coproduction works well when people and communities are engaged right from the start.
During the crowdsourcing phase of Solving Together, we see thousands of comments and suggestions from a huge range of people. Before that phase there is lots of detailed planning to identify and shape the challenges on the platform, as well as to mobilise communities to get involved.
We work alongside lived experience partners; their expertise and experience are vital in helping to shape ideas, in mobilising their communities and networks to get involved and in working alongside NHS staff to develop crowdsourcing ideas further.
Read more about how we work together to solve together:
- As part of Coproduction Week 2023, Gillian Driscoll, Community Mobilisation Lead in the Solving Together team, took part in a session “Coproduction at the heart of QI and Nurturing Capability”, and talked about how coproduction is part of every stage of the Solving Together roadmap. It was an energised session about the power and importance of coproduction in quality improvement.
- An example of where ideas from crowdsourcing lead directly to change is when we heard through crowdsourcing for elective care recovery that people from areas of high levels of deprivation have a poorer relationship with planned hospital care than those from more affluent areas. People observed that sharing accurate and meaningful data about this will allow for interventions to be prioritised, targeted, and monitored. This became a Big Idea, and as a result a Data Driven Inclusive Recovery summit was held as well as the creation of a space on Health Inequalities Improvement Programme on NHS Futures . You can find the recordings from the summit, as well as collaborate with others to help address health inequalities in this NHS Futures community.
- When Solving Together joined the Big Conversation Tim Ferris, Director of Transformation at NHS England, reminded us that “we make so much more progress when we learn and share together.”
"The beauty of Solving Together is that everybody is equal and has an opportunity to express idea no matter who they are.” Cristina Serrao, Lived Experience Ambassador, NHS England
Let’s keep Solving Together…
Mark Agathangelou is a lived experience partner, and Cristina Serrao is a Lived Experience Ambassador in NHS England. Both have worked with Solving Together since its inception and share with us their thoughts about Co-Production and Solving Together in this blog.
Mark discusses bringing in other lived experience partners using his network of networks. You're receiving this update because you registered on the platform. Can you remember why you did that? Were you interested in responding to one of the challenges by sharing experience or suggestions or did you join to find out more generally? How could you help mobilise your networks to be involved in the future by encouraging others to sign up?
Continuing the conversations and staying connected
Another way of being connected is to join the conversations on our very active social media channels. For the latest news and to keep in touch with the Solving Together community go to Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net
The Solving Together team hope this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.
Blog by Mark Agathangelou, Solving Together Lived Experience Partner and Cristina Serrao, Lived Experience Ambassador
Mark:
As a lived experience partner (LEP) working with NHS England since 2020, I’ve had the opportunity to watch Solving Together develop, actually attending its launch in 2022 where I got the chance to have a breakout talk about elective care pathways with senior NHS professionals. And that’s been the hallmark of my quite considerable involvement with the project, work being conducted in a spirit of equality, openness and co-production.
Scrolling forward to 2023, Self-Referral to Community Health Services was another area of involvement for me, being asked to make a varied input to this as a LEP. As well as commenting extensively on the platform on various ideas, I was also asked to participate in a very intense tweet chat on the subject which generated a real buzz and lot of great ideas in addition to being a lot of fun.
Shortly after that I played a slightly different role with the data driven elective recovery event run by the team. I was requested to attend as an LEP in order to help in giving it greater balance and a patient-centred perspective. But I was also able to utilise my ‘network of networks’ to connect the team to a very impressive LEP who was able to contribute by presenting to the webinar, making a really powerful impact.
Overall, I feel a lot of satisfaction about my involvement with Solving Together. The ethos of the project is wholly aligned with what matters to me – generating improvements to health services by harvesting great ideas from anybody who wants to get involved based on strong co-production principles. And in my work with the team I have felt respected and valued and that I’ve made a real contribution.
Cristina:
Due to my involvement in the national Best MSK Health Collaborative programme I was invited to be a Solving Together champion for Elective Care. Lived experience partners have always enjoyed being a part of crowdsourcing. Solving Together is open and inclusive whilst sitting alongside clinical colleagues in equal partnership.
I have proudly presented with Solving Together with a lived experience partner at NHS Confed Expo 2022, and I co-presented at the IHI conference in Copenhagen in 2023 alongside Bev Matthews and Matthew Hill from The Health Foundation. At both events I expressed the importance of involving both lived and learnt experience to share ideas.
Lived experience partners have been involved with Solving Together by putting ideas onto the platform and being active members of tweet chats. The beauty of Solving Together is that everybody is equal and has an opportunity express ideas no matter who they are.
Coproduction resources
Co-production & Quality Improvement resources, including a guide, literature review, films & postcards, can be found here.
Today marks 75 years of the NHS!
It is a time to celebrate our past, but more importantly, a time to think about a future where we continue to support the principles of the NHS Constitution. The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it. We in Solving Together follow these principles and fully involve patients, staff, families, carers, communities, and professionals inside and outside the NHS.
There has been a grand total of more than 300,000 interactions with the communities and people the NHS serves since Solving Together launched in 2022. We’d like to take a moment to celebrate this milestone and share our thanks with everyone in the Solving Together community for their continued engagement and involvement.
Volunteers of all ages and backgrounds make a huge contribution to the health and wellbeing of the nation, sharing their time, compassion and expertise to support the NHS, charities, faith groups and communities. Why not join them as we mark 75 years of the NHS? As we shared in last week's update, Hospital Discharge crowdsourcing has contributed to the NHS Care Responders programme which involves creating an NHS ‘volunteer army’ to take medicines into people’s homes, carry out shopping and other errands to support people to be discharged from hospital earlier in the day.
Coproduction week 2023
Coproduction is at the heart of Solving Together, with people who use services and people who provide services involved at every single step of the process.
We’re very excited this week to be supporting National Co-production Week . On Thursday, Gillian Driscoll, our Community Mobilisation Lead in the Solving Together team will be joining a webinar to talk about how the Solving Together approach is underpinned by co-production, with opportunities for everyone to be part of the crowdsourcing and development of big ideas, to improve our health services. For more details and to book your free place on the session, see this page: Co-production at the heart of QI & Nurturing Capability .
Get Involved….
As part of the NHS75 birthday celebrations, the NHS across the UK has teamed up with parkrun with ‘parkrun for the NHS’ over the weekend of 8 and 9 July. Anyone can get involved with people invited to walk, jog or run 5K at their local parkrun to celebrate this major milestone in the NHS’ history.
There’s a huge parkrun fan in the Solving Together team...me! Find out why I recommend parkrun in this idea self-refer to park run . I shared this idea as part of the crowdsourcing for self-referral to Community Health Services crowdsourcing. There are lots more ideas and discussions about self-referral to community health services available on the Solving Together platform.
We all know the benefits of physical exercise to keep us healthy, and in “Taking a bold leap to embed physical activity in health systems”, Tom Underwood from NHS Horizons tells us about an initiative with Sport England and OPID (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities), around embedding physical activity within health systems, to help people to stay healthy and to support the management of long-term conditions. The blog includes an acknowledgement of Solving Together's contribution to the programme in helping spot connections, bringing partners together and introducing new voices, skills and experiences to learn from.
Continuing the conversations and staying connected
We have a very active presence on social media. For the latest news and to stay connected with the Solving Together community, keep in touch through our channels: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net
The Solving Together team hopes this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.
“Great change starts with small conversations amongst people who care” Margaret Wheatley
Thank you for being part of the Solving Together community where we encourage people to share ideas, challenge assumptions and provide solutions, with a ‘no wrong answers’ approach. We'd like to share an update on what’s been happening with Solving Together, share some of our thoughts and signpost you to some great resources.
Spreading the word!
As you know, by signing up to the Solving Together platform you will have access to lots of resources and also, when we are actively crowdsourcing challenges, the opportunity to post ideas and experiences or engage with other people’s posts. If you haven't signed up yet, click the 'register' button at the top of your screen. We are hoping you will join us by helping increase access to this platform so your colleagues and peers can get involved too. Please do share this link to register on the platform: www.solvingtogether.crowdicity.com .
Let’s keep Solving Together….
In between the active crowdsourcing challenges there is lots of work still to do! The journey from posting an idea, adding a comment or voting is shown on the Solving Together Roadmap.
From crowdsourcing, through theming, prototyping and testing to scale and spread. This wealth of ideas is contributing to solutions for the biggest challenges currently facing our health and care service. Here are a couple of examples:
• Creating an NHS ‘volunteer army’ to take medicines into people’s homes, carry out shopping and other errands to support people to be discharged from hospital earlier in the day. Hospital Discharge crowdsourcing has contributed to NHS Care, the NHS and social care volunteers programme launched by Social Care Minister, Helen Whately in June 2023.
• In response to a clear message that we heard during the crowdsourcing phase of the Elective Care Recovery challenges, in April of this year the first national summit on using data to drive inclusive recovery of elective services was held. The summit was a partnership between Professor Bola Owolabi, Director, National Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme at NHS England; Sir James Mackey, National Director of Elective Recovery and Solving Together. The event brought together local and national teams from across the country to share learning and to begin working collaboratively towards this goal. Following the summit, discussion around health inequalities and elective care continues on the Health Inequalities NHS Futures space. Please do sign up to this community where you will be able to access the keynote presentations, recordings of case studies, and a range of other resources and information.
• The Q Community has identified a number of ideas submitted during the Elective Care Recovery crowdsourcing to support their work and activities with their members. This ensures all ideas contribute to improvement programmes across England. You can hear more about this in the School for Change Agents’ ‘Agents Assemble’ podcast where Solving Together Programme Director Bev Matthews talks with Tim Ferris, Director of Transformation at NHS England about the opportunities for ensuring we make every contribution count.
Continuing the conversations and staying connected
We have a very active influencing presence on social media. For the latest news and to stay connected with the Solving Together community, keep in touch through our channels: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net
The Solving Together team hopes this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.
From our work over the past two years we can be very proud of the way that the NHS and its partners came together to respond to COVID-19, the biggest challenge that we have faced since the NHS was founded. Our pandemic response clearly showed that by working together we could develop, test and adopt effective solutions to health challenges at an incredible pace. Managing the tasks before us now is in some ways even bigger because it includes recovering a much larger set of services. Just as with the pandemic response, we are looking to you, the experts in delivering high quality care, for ideas for how best to address the challenges we now face. We need your help.
With that in mind I am delighted to launch #SolvingTogether today, a new platform for everyone in the NHS to post their ideas for how to recover elective services, redesign care delivery, and address health inequalities. We want you to let us know what’s worked for you and your ideas for making the NHS better: better for our patients and better ways of working within the NHS. The platform is open to all and enables us to learn from you the ideas of those that know best how to recover elective services – those leading, delivering or receiving care.
Who can get involved?
Everyone. And we mean everyone. #SolvingTogether will be open to people in health and care in every role and at every level, to people who use health and care services and their families, and to partners in other sectors.
We hope that you can contribute to #SolvingTogether with your ideas, experiences, practices, votes, and comments. No idea is too small, and no one is too inexperienced to take part.
I look forward to hearing your ideas, and I am truly excited by the potential we have to transform health and care together.
How you can get involved
There are several ways to get involved with #SolvingTogether, in addition to the online platform; through connect sessions, and by joining in with tweet chats.
The #SolvingTogether platform is the main place where you can post ideas. It’s easy to join. You simply need to register so we know where the idea came from, and this process only takes a few seconds.
On the platform you will find seven ‘challenges’. We’d love to hear your ideas for addressing them. They are
- Rethinking demand
- Making elective service recovery fair, inclusive and accessible
- Boosting capacity
- Building outstanding theatre teams
- Coordinating elective care
- Thinking the unthinkable – How might we deliver elective care in very different ways in the future
- Supporting people waiting for hip and knee operations
If you don’t have an idea to post, you can still get involved on this crowdsourcing platform by commenting and voting on ideas that other people have shared.
Whats Next?
The #SolvingTogether platform will be open for new ideas about reducing waiting times for elective care until June 2022. We are then going to start testing the most promising ideas about reducing waiting times for elective care, with support from teams across the country. The teams will be supported by improvement coaches to utilise the latest rapid prototyping techniques.
The best ideas will be supported for spread across the country.
Connect sessions and tweet chats
The Connect sessions are virtual ideas-storming sessions which will be held over a range of dates. The Connect sessions are informal opportunities to put forward ideas and have discussion; anyone can join to share their ideas for addressing the challenges. The Connect sessions will be held on MS Teams.
Ideas shared during the Connect sessions will be collated and added to the #SolvingTogether platform, meaning the conversation about them can continue whilst the platform is live.
Tweet chats
Everyone is welcome to join the #SolvingTogether tweet chats, all you need is a Twitter account. To join in with the conversation, please look out for tweets from @HorizonsNHS with the hashtag #SolvingTogether.
Again, ideas shared during the tweet chats will be added to the #SolvingTogether platform.
Find out more about the tweet chats and Connect sessions on the #SolvingTogether website.
Dr Timothy Ferris
Dr Timothy Ferris took up the post as the National Director of Transformation on 10 May 2021.
Dr Ferris, who has served as a non-executive director of NHS Improvement for almost three years, is internationally renowned for his pioneering work on improving health and care in both hospital and community settings.
He will lead the new Transformation Directorate, bringing together the organisation’s operational improvement team and NHSX, the digital arm, to maintain the pace of innovation seen during the pandemic.
Dr Ferris joins the NHS full-time from the not-for-profit Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, where he is chief executive, and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Center for Population Health, which champions the use of prevention and data to improve health, reduce inequalities, and save lives.