The appeal of the Always Events is it's focused on what matters most to patients.
Because the feedback from the patients is instant the changes happen there and then
so it wasn't an issue getting staff engaged at all.
For me always events are a way of really ensuring that we are doing the best for people who
use our services, their families and carers.
What we have seen is a tremendous impact, in terms of how service users and staff have
responded to the initiative.
I feel like I'm... part of... part of my care, yeah.
We were inspired to develop Always Events by Kate Granger and her campaign to get ourselves
to introduce ourselves to patients and carers and it struck us that while introducing ourselves
is really important it wasn't the only thing that should always...
happen.
And Kate really liked the idea but Kate was also very insistent that whatever we did should
be owned and developed by staff and patients themselves and it shouldn't be imposed from
above.
So Always Events was a perfect methodology reminding us that certain things always needed
to happen but what you pick as an Always Event is decided by your staff group, your patient
group, your carer group and they work it out together.
And it's proved to be enormously successful in those Trusts and other NHS organisations
who tried it.
What we did is looked at a lot of the complaints on the ward, the friends and family responses,
then we asked several questions on the ward, we asked the question of, "what would make
the patients feel safe and cared for?"
Out of this came three themes really, one was the answering of call buzzers, medication
and delays in receiving medication sometimes, and also the communication with relatives.
The thing that we are concentrating on at the moment is the call buzzers, and what I've
started is running some workshops with staff and patients.
So for example yesterday, I had two staff members, a trained nurse and a health care
and two patients because obviously it's a respiratory ward the patients are quite breathless
so we stayed at the bedside and we discussed how they felt when there were delays in their
buzzers answering and how it felt to be breathless.
At lunchtime we allocate someone for buzzers, so another time they mentioned was first thing
in the morning it's always extremely busy during handovers so we look to allocating
a staff member to do buzzers at that time.
We're hoping to have made lots of small changes, with the involvement of patients I hope that
they'll feel more involved in the way that we make changes on the ward and improve communication.
The staff and patient workshops I feel are very important for raising awareness and then
to use these examples in the future for how we develop care on the ward.
So for me what the Always Events enable the magic mix, they enable us to really understand
what really matters deeply to people and then provide that environment for the people who
are using the services their families, their carers and some of the people providing care
at the point of care, to create a co-design team to enable that to happen, to come up
with some ideas for improvements so some change ideas.
What I've seen is that staff have really embraced and owned the initiative and being able to
work with service users, people who use our services, in true partnership respecting,
listening, paying attention to the things that are really important to the people that
use our services and that really optimises the opportunities to improve care and put
people at the heart of everything we do.
Our Always Event was around 'I will always be supported in moving on in care' they came
up with fabulous ideas like it would be really good if letters came with photographs on them
so we knew who was going to come and see us or if there's been a change.
So what the team did then was absolutely redesigned that so all the letters now have photographs
on them.
Interviewer: When your idea was chosen, how did you feel about that?
I felt chuffed!
For me, it's kind of, Always Events is get involved because it's the right thing to do
and it will design something that will work and that'll be sustained and you can then
spread.
Always Events has proven to be a really effective programme and there are two particular reasons
for getting involved, the first is that they really come with ownership from the patients
and staff, they're focusing on things that people think matter and they are developing
changes which people are really committed to delivering so they last beyond the improvement
programme.
But second also is the involvement of the Institute of Health Care Improvement and the
Picker Institute have really added value to this programme, they come with a lot of knowledge
of what other health care organisations have done, both in the NHS and overseas and they
come with some really good ideas about how we can measure effectiveness of the Always
Events without adding lots of cumbersome new methodologies, so I think those are two particular
ingredients that I'd recommend, and that people have found really valuable from the programme.