Karen McNiven, HI Team Leads

Health Improvement – Working Better Together

Back in 2016 the Health Improvement Team (including HI Leads) began implementing iMatter.  A number of sessions were put in place for all managers across the organisation that were led by our Organisational Development Team to allow staff the opportunity to get information on the new system and to highlight any potential issues and queries. These awareness raising sessions supported managers to be more confident in the new system and how it would be applied.

I also organised a local session with the all of HI team to ensure all staff were aware of the process and how they can contribute going forward.  The team were generally very positive about the new process as they had recently been involved in another area of work to support them with tools to plan and work better together.  They saw this as another tool to capture some key points for improvement. 

All of the team were issued with the iMatter Survey including the HI Leads.  All of the sub-teams were able to see the results and discuss any important issues they would like to see put in place in terms of improvement actions. The overall scoring for the team report was very positive as all areas were showing green.  This helped reassure the team that they were being fully supported and able to work well together and influence decisions.  The areas were scores were a bit lower were the questions that related to the wider organisational and how they can influence in wider context.  We discussed these aspects in detail as a team, and the challenges presented in such a big organisation and talked through how we can respond to this area going forward.

The HI Leads were supported with a number of follow up sessions to discuss the iMatter results for them as a management team specifically.  This helped us to reflect on how we were working as team and what improvements we could make to continue to build on not only the positive feedback, but also address some of the issues they had raised some concern about in the survey.

The whole process allowed us the opportunity to have more reflective and planning time together, something we hadn’t taken time to realise and implement until having discussed it in detail, following iMatter.

It supported a positive working environment, focussed on continuous improvement, where we could work more closely together to identify key actions for improvement. For example, improving communication through having a focused approach to communication, properly engaging the full team – something which was missing before. In addition to the team meetings, staff agreed to put time in to catch up and work better together away from core team meetings.  They added some more planning time in to meet to discuss key cross–cutting areas of work and common issues etc.  This helped build better communication across the team, communicating in ways we’d never done before – and iMatter discussions helped us realise this was possible.  

The information gathered from iMatter over the 2 year period has been very useful in that it allows us to also see the areas where we continue to do well. It affords us with the opportunity to celebrate these achievements. It also allowed us to see how the actions we put in place from the previous year’s survey enabled positive change to take place and share this amongst the wider HI team so all staff are engaged in the changes and encourages us to be open about the positive impacts the actions have had. This has reassured the team that changes can happen to improve how we work better together and in turn improve our services to local people.

iMatter is an excellent tool that we have welcomed within the team and importantly seen the benefits of in terms of how we can track our progress and how we can continue to use the information to allow us to continue to influence change not only within our team but across the organisation.   As a result, we’ve improved our Employee Engagement Index (EEI) score in 2018 within the team leads and we’re aiming for this trend to continue.

Karen McNiven

Health Improvement Manager

Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership