Tweets of the Week, 12th June 2020

The Horizons team features many influential Twitter users. This curates a wealth of insights, knowledge, and information about transformation in health and care from other thought leaders across the world. (Tip: to read an article or watch a video mentioned in a tweet, click on the blue text. To view the original tweet, click on the image).

Diversity and Inclusion

It's in times of crisis that inequalities come to the fore, and the disproportionate affect of Covid-19 on BAME communities in conjunction with the #BlackLivesMatter movement have left many hungry for real change. However, in an area in which many people do nothing for fear of misstepping, one question that we are hearing more and more is "What can I do to help?" Dr Habib Naqvi brings our attention to his blog from back in 2019 on how we all have a role to play in turning the dream of race equality into reality.

Truly listening to others' experiences of inequality is certainly a prerequisite to this change. However, this means more than simply being quiet, but using your platform to create the space for conversations and listening to others. Helen shared an article by the King's Fund on ways to create space for conversations in your team.

#Caring4NHSPeople

In this week's #Caring4NHSPeople webinar facilitated by Horizons, a panel of experts in leadership and well-being came together to hold an interactive session prompting discussion around how the NHS systems and people can support its leaders. You can watch a recording of this session here. We also ran a live tweet thread during the event, where you can access key points and the twitter accounts of the contributors.

Next week's #Caring4NHSPeople webinar will focus on how OD can support staff wellbeing. Find the joining details here.

Health & Wellbeing

It's important to acknowledge some of the key sources of stressors created by Covid-19. Identifying these and supporting staff to either avoid or mitigate their effects is crucial for ensuring that they don't affect quality of care. Read more.

Helen shared this great infographic which shows how the practice of leading and managing a team often starts with learning how to manage yourself. It marks out some clear goals to strive towards as well as some practices to avoid as you try to bring out the best in others.

Leigh's tweet reminds us that there is no 'expected' way to feel or react in these uncertain times. It's important to be easy on yourself in such circumstances, and if you see others struggling, let them know that too.

#NHSChangeChallenge

The #NHSChangeChallenge is an initiative to capture these changes using crowdsourcing methods and its success so far is highlighting the importance of capturing the learning during the crisis, rather than retrospectively. This week we put a focus on finding out what stopped because of Covid-19 that we'd rather keep that way.

See some examples here of the kind of things which have been submitted.

Beneficial Changes

The Horizons team supported a workshop about beneficial changes that have been started or accelerated as part of the pandemic.

The workshop involved a range of virtual collaboration methods.

Virtual Collaborate

Some resources for facilitating virtual conferences.

Liberating structures are conversational tools that we use often as methods of breaking down communicative barriers to give people the space to share their thoughts and experiences. See Matthew Mezey's Q Health article on the growing use of liberating structures across the NHS and how they can be usefd virtually.

Whilst it's perhaps more important than ever to make time to connect as a team, virtual check-ins can easily become stale if there's no activity or focus for the time. Helen here shares an article on 12 virtual team building activities to help you master the art of the virtual check-in that colleagues look forward to, rather than look forward to logging off.

#TestingMethods2020

Thursday marked Biomedical Science Day, and Bev presented the Horizons #TestingMethods2020 project at the National Diagnostics Testing Conference. In this work, crowdsourcing methods were utilised to achieve rapid cross-sector collaboration on testing methods for Covid-19.

One example of the challenges being discussed by the testing methods community this week is how to reduce the environmental impact of Covid-19 testing. Head to the Testing Methods site if you'd like to contribute to the solution!

What Matters to You?

Bev shared a "What Matters To You?" 30 day challenge as a way in which to make sustainable changes in our personal lives that embraces the reality of change as emergent and shared.

Check out this brilliant bite of poetry by @isytown as a part of this #WMTY20 30 day challenge.

Quality Improvement

Helen shared some secrets on achieving fast organisational change.

A new disease shouldn’t mean we have to reinvent the wheel - there’s already lots of great learning out there from previous outbreaks. Not just for clinical knowledge but everything from well-being to quality improvement. Helen reports back from a sessions run by the Quality Forum into learning from SARS/MERS in Singapore...

...and in Taiwan.

Resources

Helen also shared details of the Health Services Research UK 2020 conference for anyone interested in some of the inspiring change work happening both in the NHS and globally.

See also this job opportunity for Director of Sustainable Development advertised on NHS England's job site.