Spread and the NHS Big Conversation

The NHS Big Conversation for Improvement took place on 11th and 12th May 2022. The fully virtual (online) event brought together people from across the NHS, Health and Care and Lived experience partners to keep #SolvingTogether and #ImprovingTogether and to learn and discuss key topics. Check out this website here for lots of fantastic resources from the event.

The Big Conversation involved the National Improvement Awards and many ‘Open Conversations’ which were open to anyone and everyone to share their successes and their ideas.

Photo by Ariel on Unsplash

National Improvement Awards

I was delighted that one of the six themes was ‘Spreading change and improvement across systems’. Spread, scale, adoption and sustainability have long been areas of great interest to me (recent blogs here).

The shortlisted entries for the ‘Spreading change and improvement across systems’ National Improvement Award category were:

Watch this recording (from time point 4.30 minutes) to hear from The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health with Us, the #StayandThrive team and the FutureNHS Team with FutureNHS Communities. Apologies from NHS South, Central and West CSU who due to short notice could not present.

And the winners were …… FutureNHS Team and FutureNHS Communities. Further details on this impressive work to follow soon in a blog.

Many congratulations to the the shortlisted entrants and to the winners.

Open conversations

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

On the second day, I co-hosted an open conversation on ‘What is needed to help people spread innovation and improvement?’ with Carol Munt @muntma and Joe Sladen @SladenJoe. The recording with slides is available here.

I started the session with some background slides exploring our understanding of spread, its challenges, the need to understand complexity and an overview of the 7 interconnected principles for spread and adoption (see Guide).

There was lots of great content in the chat box as people interacted and responded to the questions we posed.

Part of the complexity we work with in health and social care is the different and ever-changing perspectives which need to be considered e.g. national/ regional / local, spreaders / adopters, staff / patients/ carers/ public.

I was therefore delighted that Carol and Joe joined the session to speak about spread from their perspectives.

Carol shared advice on how to maximise the role of the Lived Experience Partner in spreading improvement. Carol also gave examples where this has happened well. Listen from timepoint 22.30 mins.

Joe gave us an overview on ‘what is an AHSN (Academic Health Science Network) and what does it offer’ and also shared his top tips to enable spread. Listen from timepoint 30.45 mins.

Look out for a forthcoming blog from me and Joe on ‘The approach to enabling the spread of FeNO devices'.

Finally, attendees were asked to share their top tips to enable spread with others which produced many helpful suggestions and prompted insightful discussion and further interaction.

What next?... the Next Conversation on 28 June 

To continue the conversations and themes in the Big Conversation please join us for the Next Conversation for Improvement on Tuesday 28 June, 9am to 5pm, which will occur on Twitter. You don’t have to have attended The Big Conversation to join the Next Conversation. To get involved, look out for tweets from @HorizonsNHS #ImprovingTogether and as we know not everyone is on Twitter, we’ll also have a Teams call open, for more information and the Teams link click here.

Pop in and out of the event as much as you’re able on Twitter or on Teams to talk about what you heard during The Big Conversation; your reflections; what stood out most; what learning you have or will implement.

I am leading a session, as part of the Next Conversation, on scale and spread between 10:20 and 10:55am on Tuesday 28 June, please come and join me to continue our conversation on this important topic.

Further information

A practical guide to the art of psychological safety in the real world of health and care here.

More information on the seven spread and adoption principles including blogs and videos, is available here.

If you're interested to read more there are previous blogs and further blogs to follow. Please do subscribe to this blog and follow @DianeKetley @HorizonsNHS, #NHSSpread.