Medical Directorate iMatter Team

MDET iMatter Journey

The Medical Directorate Executive Team within NES has overall responsibility for managing the education and training of some 6,000 doctors across the NHS in Scotland. Although not directly providing patient care, we are very clear that education and training is absolutely central to the work of NHS Scotland – it has been said that ‘education and training is patient safety for the next 30 years’. And the number of doctors under our wing amounts to almost 45% of all doctors in Scottish hospitals, and some 33% of all doctors in Scotland.

We manage over 250 programmes of education and training to ensure that standards set by the medical regulator are met, and in doing this we collect large amounts of feedback from doctors in training on their experiences, and the strengths and weaknesses of these programmes. We use this feedback to celebrate success, and to drive improvement where this is needed.

So it has been enormously valuable for us to have access to the iMatter tool as a means of gathering feedback from our own staff teams – within the small group of senior colleagues that makes up the medical executive team, across the medical directorate within NES, and across the wider organisation. We have been encouraged by the level of engagement.

We continue to remain clear about duties and responsibilities, are confident that our ideas and suggestions are acted upon, clear about how our roles contribute to the organization and get the information we need to do our jobs well, but very aware that we need to improve linkages with other parts of the organisation, and the provision of feedback to individuals and to other teams within medicine. The recent roll out of ‘Turas Appraisal’ – developed by NES but now in use across NHS Scotland will be a key tool to delivering these changes.