Thursday 26 February 2015

Recruiting for change



Bringing about organic cultural change.


I think it’s widely understood that for change to happen successfully and to be self sustaining there needs to be a cultural shift for any 5 year plan for the NHS to work.

Clearly one way is via SHCR reaching out to NHS staff to create change agents. This has a finite limit, only those who want to learn about being change makers will engage.

What has been abundantly clear observing this term of students is that there is one defining quality common to all no matter of status, role or location. That is their underlying caring nature, what is in their hearts and what underpins their personal satisfaction and rewards is helping people.

I don’t think these qualities are or should be the exclusive domain of those directly involved in delivering care. No matter what your role in the NHS, you, patients and the NHS will benefit directly from your passion to help, you will do a better job because it matters to you.

For that reason as part of every recruitment process, be it for book keepers, IT people, lab technicians, senior management or maintenance staff, identifying those who genuinely care and have a compassionate nature will be the ones who will stay in post because of the job rewards.

I would encourage management to ensure all those “behind the scenes” people get to spend some time closer to the patient experience so they can engage in that feeling of reward and making a difference. This would do much for the sense of cultural cohesion around a trust and would break down barriers and hierachies.  

The staff churn rate in care and in some areas in health runs as high as 19%. The cost in terms of recruitment and training that is lost to the NHS is hundreds of millions per year. People who have found their vocation and get the job rewards mean retention levels go up and the depth of experience is retained by way of organisational wisdom.  

So if at the recruitment phase measuring compassion was possible, this would improve retention, it would also be drawing the right kind of people into the NHS, so over time, perhaps 5 years the ”workforce” has been revitalised with more of the right kind of people.

A change in how the NHS recruits and the values it seeks, which might carry more weight than qualifications in some roles, is how longer term the NHS can organically change and bring about sustainable change in my view.

The recruitment tool I made for the care sector, that are already tried and tested on 1000’s of people can easily be modified to also identify those who will be open to change as well as having that special something.


As we have seen from SHCR it is the caring nature that has driven the desire to bring about change…

The cost of doing this is tiny, compared to the year on year savings via improved retention. If you can't think of a downside then you do have to ask yourself why it shouldn't be piloted:) or have I oversimplified things again? 

Friday 6 February 2015

Framing


I have used a lifetime of acquired skills in mainstream corporate communication combined with my insight in to what it is to have a learning disability as I am dyslexic to make a difference for people with learning disabilities.

I converted a 43 page legal tenancy agreement for supported living tenants in to an accessible see and hear format, the visual language was developed with continuous input from people with LD. I am now using this work as a basis for new tools to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities.

Having had unanimous positive feedback from both Clinical and academic people including professors of learning disabilities and the LD nursing community I want to bring the suicide prevention tools for people with LD into daily use by the NHS.

There are many advocates and endorsements for my work in this field I now want to form a group of academics and medical people to support the project and take it to the decision commissioners in the NHS so people with learning disabilities can benefit from this piece of work.



Thursday 5 February 2015

Reflections on Module One

If like me you have dyslexia and you have to say out loud School for Health and Care Radicals in order to type #SHCR because the letters are like bars of soap in the shower, the tighter you grasp them the further they go, it’s probably impacted your life from a very early age.

I can still remember being at primary school and being forced to stay in the head mistresses office for an excruciating length of time until I read the word “Garden” out loud, that was 52 years ago! And it still makes me clammy to think about it in writing this.

Having failed the 11+ my self confidence took a massive knock, having failed to live up to my parent’s expectations. Secondary school was even worse, back then the more enlightened teachers called it word blindness, but the majority labelled it as laziness. It was a humiliating and damaging experience. Perhaps the only positive thing that came from it was I discovered that I was “a creative” type, and that my artistic side was one area in which I could excel.

My teens and 20’s were in hindsight a period of self harm, as I sought to bury my feelings of failure and inadequacy with drugs.

To survive in the world I had to rely on “intelligence” and a creative approach to life that was not based on reading, education or conventional learning. I had to find other ways to function and absorb information about new things. Above all I learned to improvise, to solve problems with practical skills and common sense and NOT by the book.

To me this is the only way I know how to operate; I am totally left brained if you like. I also grew to dislike process, that works for those who are wired that way but for me it often seems to be a replacement for the intuitive. In fact it often appears to me to stifle free thinking with its rules and structure.

After 35 years of making it up as I went along as a video director/producer/lighting cameraman in the corporate world I started getting involved in the social housing, health and care sectors. This type of work gave me rewards I had not previously experienced and not knowing what I couldn’t do I created a visual language for people with learning disabilities as in my view this was about human skills, communication in its purest sense.

Perhaps arrogantly I felt that it was unlikely that a learning disability “professional” be it academic or clinical would be likely to have the skills I felt were important. I also felt my own disability was perhaps for the first time a gift.

Out of that project came another challenge, to make a suicide prevention tool for people with learning disabilities. Again all I had was instinct and a modicum of intelligence to throw at it. 



I spent 18 months living with it, refining reflecting and polishing. It then dawned on my as to why I was dragging my feet, because to go public to a world of Dr’s Professor’s, LD experts, LD nurses was to be put back in the head mistresses room, to be back a school, to be back in a world that was wired so differently.

What I was fearful of was rejection and failure, that my thinking was off the mark, that I had dared to say I think I know how to do it better. This is why the self efficacy element in module one really rang bells for me.

What gave me the confidence and self belief was also the thing I feared most, stepping up to the plate and being judged.

In taking the risk, being passionate about what I believed in and sharing what I thought was the right approach with a world, that I had always felt on the edge of was and is life changing.

I still have to pinch myself when I look at the universally positive feedback I have received in the last 6 months while it has been out there in it’s pilot phase.

For me a great deal of what module one has covered is instinctive, I can’t help but operate that way as my only qualification is the work that I do. I have always run my own business so the hierarchies I encounter are always external….How can I possibly influence the NHS to use my tool from the outside.

In the case of the suicide prevention project and other work around enhancing communications for patients with learning disabilities the turning point in terms of my self efficacy was down to a few people who validated my efforts, and judged me by my thinking not my status or qualifications.

So for me one of the best ways of bringing about change is to “enable” those around me by giving them confidence in their dreams and aspirations as well as having confidence in my own thinking and beliefs.

I think the power of #SHCR is the validation it brings us all, that we are not alone, what we believe in is right and because of what motivates us as humans we “know” that our intentions are in the right place, guided by what is in our hearts.

It is so rewarding to see people who have been hitherto trapped by toxic cultures, colleagues grasping at power and the myriad of obstacles that previously seem insurmountable suddenly see a shaft of light, a new possibility, by allowing their creative minds the space to think out side the box.

Revisiting the school experience for me is a chance to rewrite “what is possible” in my terms.