Tweets of the Week, 8th January 2021

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).

#OurNHSPeople

Our CEO, Sir Simon Stevens addressed fake news circulating across our press and social media during a briefing this week. In response, Bev has created a thread to showcase the reality of the situation across the NHS. 

#ProjectM

This week hosted the third #ProjectM tweet chat, you can have a look at the tweets by following the hashtag. The next tweet chat will be on the 2nd February, 7pm-8pm. 

Join us for the next #Caring4NHSPeople virtual session on Wednesday 13 January 4pm for more, joining details here.

Wellbeing

Covid-19 had presented challenges for our mental as well as our physical health. Be a good friend: recognise signs of psychological distress, how best to respond to someone who opens up to you.

Leigh shared this tweet around supporting children to stay positive by checking the language we use to describe what's going on right now. Though it's aimed at children, can be useful to anyone.

#IWD2021

Hold the date! 8 March 2021: International Women's Day, a day for virtual learning & sharing open to all health & care women & our allies. This will be the massive day of solidarity that we need. Please spread the word & retweet. Details to follow.

Change

Helen worked with Goran Henriks to distill some simple rules for leading large scale change in 2020. Rule no 3 on "working upstream" is a key concept. This piece entitled To Solve Problems Before They Happen, You Need to Unite the Right People in @behscientist from March gives a powerful example.

"Agency" is such a key concept for learning & change. Students grow their agency when they take more control of their own learning. Just as leaders in organisations can support their teams to build individual & collective agency & take more power.

The Center for Implementation, Canada @TCI_ca has identified 37 core competencies for "implementation practitioners", i.e. people leading change, based on evidence. Useful if you're planning a major change implementation to ensure you have all bases covered.

As we consider the kind of responsive, safe, effective health & care systems we want for the future, we will see a shift from Safety-I to Safety-II thinking & practice: Not just focused on patient safety but multiple aspects of improvement.

Leadership

Sir Liam Donaldson, pioneer of patient safety, & colleagues have published Textbook of Patient Safety & Clinical Risk Management (2021). It's open access and free. The content is outstanding, written by leading thinkers and practitioners globally.

We're leaving 2020 behind but we're still in the midst of the pandemic. Kanter's Law applies ("change is always hardest/messiest in the middle"). So even if you don't usually set New Year's resolutions, it's a good time to think about it.

This excellent new (free) book chapter "Complexity science as a frame for understanding the management & delivery of high quality & safer care" by Jeffery Braithwaite & colleagues shows the benefits of a complexity, rather than mechanistic, mindset for change.

#VirtualCollaborate

Workshops, when they're well run, can add so much value to change processes & virtual workshops can be even more valuable than face to face ones: they're easier to prepare & to document outcomes, better for introverts & help save the planet.

A behavior to reflect on in 2021 is smartphones. Even the presence of a switched-off phone drops our cognitive capacity (ability to access the information in our brains). Phone on the desk (worse); phone in another room (best):

Learning and Resources

During 2020, Helen included graphics with quotations from other people with my tweets. She's saved up the graphics during the year & made them into a slide deck. Here are 23 quotations that inspired Helen or moved Helen to action the most in the past year.

Similarly, during 2020 there have been many outstanding new articles, blogs and papers offering guidance, evidence and/or inspiration for leaders of change. Here are 36 slides Helen made during the year to go with a tweet, each summarising relevant and useful content.

Helen and the Horizons team are big fans of @impactwales and their brilliant sketchnotes aimed at educators. Here's one on keeping pupils learning even during our current restrictions. Not only is it useful for parents whose children are learning at home, it's also highly relevant to leaders of virtual teams.

The Pandemic Kindness Movement was set up by clinicians across Australia to support people working in health & care during #Covid19. I love their "pyramid of needs" and links to  fantastic resources that are contained at each level of the pyramid.

And finally... 

Helen decided to start her Twitter posts in 2021 with some profound wisdom from @lizandmollie. Here's to much success in 2021, to investing in the learning (which may be failure) that creates it & to not having to re-learn the same lessons multiple times:

A big event can make it feel like the world is falling apart ... but there are millions of tiny acts of kindness still holding it together.  We end with a lovely sketchnote from @twisteddoodles.