F. Hulihan, Specialist Children’s Services and C&F

Reflective improvement in Children and Families

Children and Families and Specialist Children service teams have actively adopted the iMatter initiative over the past 3 years with improving outcomes and feedback. We have had good return rate within the team generally.

Each team is actively encouraged not just to look at that years report but reflect on the previous years and show areas of improvement in the 3 domain areas.

This year, the information obtained annually by each staff group has been used by team leaders to support  individual teams to grow and develop and sense of improved team working  and staff wellbeing.

So What Did We Do?

This year we actively promoted further team reflection with Emotional intelligence concepts and kindness in teams.

We have also adopted the principals of understanding team personality and having team events to improve sense of team working and understanding. This has been adopted in the senior team and now being rolled out to one Locality Health Visiting team as a test of change.

The iMatter reports have been used alongside other staff surveys carried out over the year, such as Child services inspections, stress surveys, Breastfeeding staff Audit, Children & Families team adopting flexi time Team individual 121s.

This allows us to cross reference themes and check staff wellbeing and impact, not just against one tool but triangulating across what has been applied each year to the teams.

We have also adopted a wider team leader group to share learning and focus on specific areas such as staff development and senior staff visibility to enhance the experience with integrated staff training and development.

We were active in showcasing learning from excellence examples and awards via the HSCP staff awards, and Board chairman’s awards. This has raised the profile over the past few years with staff being recognised for their achievements and accomplishments.

And there's more!

As a team leader group we adopted the Lunch and Learn concept in 2018-19 to move to a peer support meeting, sharing best practice and good examples of policy application as well as joint learning on new systems (i.e. EMIS, TURAS and HR/ Occupational Health). We also used this opportunity to develop leadership skills and aligned each event to a leadership concept using internal leadership resources.

This evaluated very well in this group with improved iMatter feedback this year. This was chaired by the service manager with a commitment twice monthly to staff development and support.

What's the impact been?

Staff have been delighted with the progress of the team since their iMatter action planning discussion. Here’s what they had to say:

“the iMatter process has really helped with our communication and team working.  I think we are much more open and honest with each other”

“iMatter has also allowed our teams to think wider than just our own services and this has helped in increasing our working collaboratively with other HSCP teams and other agencies”

“In the use of iMatter and especially developing our action plan, this gives us a focus on our work and we also know that this is now recognised by senior management and others!”