Health Information Services Team

A Fishy Tale

NHS 24's Health Information Services Team - A Fishy Tale... 

NHS 24's Health Information Services (HIS) department consists of three teams, with three different managers and all of whom are geographically split across two centres – Clydebank and Aberdeen.

Background

Our iMatter journey began in 2015.  Feedback from each of the three teams had similar themes – so we decided that the best way forward was to work closer together on the themes that we all had as common ground.  While there was still a requirement to have three separate iMatter questionnaires, we agreed to do a joint action plan.  We took the response rate and the Employee Engagement Index from the three questionnaires, and worked out the average to produce these joint figures:

• Response rate across the three teams - 84%
• Employee Engagement Index - 77%

A representative was nominated from each individual team to gather comments and discuss actions. These were brought to a larger meeting with management representation to facilitate. From there, our joint actions were decided and our storyboard made.

Areas of improvement agreed as key priorities across all teams:

1. Improved communications regarding matters affecting staff
2. Improved visibility of senior management team
3. Agreed use of current and new processes to improve transparency and consistency.

What We Did

  First, we agreed to engage with FISH PHILOSOPHY  that focuses on:

• ENGAGEMENT AND MORALE
• CUSTOMER SERVICE
• TEAMWORK AND TRUST
• RETENTION AND RECRUITMENT

Sessions were organised for everyone and we had great buy in from our team!

What We Achieved

What we are doing now to keep this going

• Monthly team brief- news, views and stories, both business and pleasure, created for the team by the team.

• Development Coach role created - allowing a team member to take responsibility for asking the team what training they feel they need and arranging for it to be delivered with the intention of improving staff knowledge of  the services we provide.

• Themed months- Champions selected for topic areas that our service delivers. This involves knowledge updates and reminders to the team from the champion; reinforced through quizzes (sometimes with prizes) and fun topical facts.

• New updated holiday process put in place – this demonstrates transparency and evidences that management are listening to staff concerns and acting on them to improve morale.

 What have we still to do?

Team building days and, of course our next iMatter session! 

NHS Health Information Services – Some members of the team