#ProjectA - Update and Next Steps

Everyone involved with #ProjectA has been busy over the past few months! Commissioned by Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England, and facilitated by the Horizons team and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives the input, energy and direction of the work is steered by frontline ambulance staff.

The momentum has been mounting; frontline ambulance service staff and patients nationwide have been identifying and implementing ideas that will lead to improvements in urgent and emergency services.

Since the project was launched at the end of June this year, you’ve shared an incredible 608 ideas via the ideas platform and tweet chats.

We categorised those ideas as per the diagram below: 

Twelve of those ideas were selected for a two day virtual ‘innovation burst’ in September – where 198 staff collaborated to test and prototype them. Here’s a snap of the ‘innovation burst’ in action: 

You can read more about the innovation burst on the Horizons website.

What’s next?

Six specific activities emerged from the innovation burst for further work and progression:

• Action on falls: The aim is to develop and implement a falls response framework that will be relevant to every ambulance service and that will lead to better, more appropriate services for people who fall, less conveyance and/or help stop people from falling in the first place or falling again.
• Action on mental health and emotional distress: To create an actionable “knowledge bank” for use by frontline ambulance staff and share and test approaches to supporting people in mental health crisis and emotional distress.
• Action on partnership: people, families and the wider community: To co-produce a campaign that focusses on how to access and use services. It will be a two-way partnership, created in the spirit of community engagement, co-creation and activism, using multiple communication channels including social media.
• Action on staff wellbeing: Develop a virtual collaborative that looks to support ongoing work within the Human Resource Directors’ Group (HRDs) and Strategic Partnership Forum (trust and union representatives) with a focus on implementing clinical supervision across all ambulance services.
• A directory of ideas for improvement: Share the 70 ideas with the most potential for implementation from the #ProjectA ideas’ platform and create a series of challenges to help make trusts introduce them.
• Virtual collaboration: Build the capability of the ambulance workforce to collaborate virtually; reducing time away from work and abstraction; increasing opportunities for sharing, learning and speeding up change.

Get involved! Join one the six collaboratives. Ask your local #ProjectA lead, have a look on Twitter (@HorizonsNHS / #ProjectA); or drop us a line.

This sketchnote shows how the ideas were 'funnelled' to the final six ideas for implementation.

Directory of Good Ideas

We are compiling a directory of good ideas that showcases the work already ongoing in Trusts. The directory is in response to front line staff feedback: to share good ideas between trusts, and for senior leadership to help implement them. We are expecting to launch the directory by the end of 2018. We’re hoping you will read it, share it, and implement the ideas.

Get Involved!

#ProjectA is an improvement programme led by front line staff, and we want to make sure it remains true to this ethos. The ambulance chief executives and chairs hold overwhelming support for the continuation of #ProjectA and ownership of the programme by the front line. They recognise the connections that have been made and the desire to pull through improvement from across the service that has been generated by operational colleagues.

Please do keep getting involved – join one of the collaboratives (as above); take a look at the ideas directory when it’s launched; keep talking to one another via Twitter (@HorizonsNHS / #ProjectA) and on the Facebook group.