Streamlining Programme, Support and Resources – Skills for Health

The Streamlining Programme was a collaboration between Skills for Health, HR for London and NHS Employers, the programme has saved millions of pounds and improved efficiency and quality in three key areas:

• Junior doctors’ rotations
• Employment checks
• Statutory and mandatory training

By working together to benchmark performance and share best practices, the 39 London trusts have increased performance in respect of training compliance, reduced duplication and achieved a dramatic reduction in costs. Simultaneously, the programme has delivered higher quality, improved efficiency and greater productivity.

Case studies, guidance documents and advice from the participating London HR Directors are all available.

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A Bigger Difference: Realising The Potential Of Voluntary Organisations And Volunteers – National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

Report that identifies voluntary organisations have particular strengths in providing preventative and specialist services. There is compelling evidence that earlier action can lead to major savings for the state1 – and yet, current government spending mechanisms limit investment in these services. It includes examples of best practice of collaboration and joint working between voluntary organisations and public services.

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10 Priorities For Resolving The Crisis In Emergency Departments – The College of Emergency Medicine

Concise proposals from The College of Emergency Medicine that are the collective view of practicing emergency physicians and aim to represent cost-effective solutions to ensure that safe patient care can be delivered. It identifies 5 proposals for NHS England to address and 5 for members of the college to address.

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Working together to assess how well led organisations are – NHS Trust Development Authority

The NHS Trust Development Authority, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Monitor have committed to developing an aligned framework for making judgements about how well led NHS providers are.

By ‘well led’ we mean that the leadership, management and governance of the organisation assure the delivery of high quality care for patients, support learning and innovation and promote an open and fair culture.

This article outlines their statement of intent.

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The 7 Principles of Personal Effectiveness – An Obsession With Transformation Blog

Blog post from Dr. Peter Fuda that identifies seven principles on the path to personal effectiveness captured by the acronym A-D-D-R-E-S-S.

1. Accept Responsibility
2. Define Success
3. Develop a System You Trust
4. Recruit Your Stakeholders
5. Embed Routines & Rituals
6. Steer Meetings & Interations
7. Stay On Track Under Pressure

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Shared Learning – Values Based Recruitment – NHS Empolyers

NHS Employers shared learning on Values Based Recruitment. Case studies on:

• Developing a behavioural framework
• Assessment centre recruitment approach
• Recruiting for values internationally

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Three Quick Ways to Improve Your Strategy-Making – Harvard Business Review Blog

The standard strategy processes at most companies share three common characteristics: 1) you wait until the annual strategy review to revisit your strategy; 2) you put together a SWOT analysis as input to the start of the strategy process; and 3) you start the strategy process with a long and arduous exercise to wordsmith a mission/vision statement or organizational aspiration.

These activities are, no doubt, reassuring and familiar. They are also almost completely useless. This article takes a look at each in turn.

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Strategy’s No Good Unless You End Up Somewhere New – Harvard Business Review Blog

Innovation isn’t always strategic, but strategy making sure as heck better be innovative. By definition, strategy is about allocating resources today to secure a better tomorrow. It is important, however, to understand the nuances and complexities of innovation as they relate to strategy. The author lists four innovations that they believe are the most important.

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Annualisation: an approach to consultant job planning – British Journal of Healthcare Management Article

In this article, we have considered the background of annualised hours and the relevant legislation framework in the UK, advantages and disadvantages for employers and employees, the key principals of implementation of annualisation of consultant job planning. We have also brought examples of the NHS trusts’ formulated policies in support of annualisation.

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NHS Qualified Nurse Supply And Demand Survey – Findings – NHS Employers

This NHS Employers survey provides information on demand and supply of the qualified nurse workforce in NHS service provider organisations. The data collected will help to inform and shape co-ordinated recruitment and retention initiatives.

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Mobilising identities: the shape and reality of middle and junior managers  working lives – a qualitative study – National Institute for Health Research

Report of a study that aims to capture, chart and explore the work and roles of mid and junior healthcare managers in the NHS.

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Health Professional Mobility In A Changing Europe: New Dynamics, Mobile Individuals And Diverse Responses – World Health Organization (WHO)

This report is grouped into three parts: the changing dynamics of health professional mobility, the mobile individual and policy responses in a changing Europe. It presents practical tools such as a yardstick for registry methodology, a typology of mobile individuals, qualitative tools for studying the motivation of the workforce and a set of concrete policy responses at EU, national and organizational level including bilateral agreements, codes and workplace responses.

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How to execute a 15-word strategy statement – Harvard Business Review Blog

Explanation of how to create a story which explains your business, which can then be used to help develop a value proposition. It then explains how value statements can be compared used the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy canvas approach’ to help see how your business differs from competition. Once the correct narrative is agreed then it can be distilled down to a more concise statement.

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Are you confusing strategy with planning? – Harvard Business Review Blog

This article argues that humans hate failure and try to avoid experiencing it. This results in managers defaulting to planning rather than strategy. An assessment is provided to check personal likelihood of falling into ‘comfort traps’.

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Resilience 1 TRP – The Hope Street Centre

Short video explaining what makes us stressed

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Using balanced metrics and mixed methods to better understand QI interventions – BMJ Quality and Safety

Improving quality while maintaining or reducing costs requires balancing competing demands to bring value to healthcare. High-value reporting of quality improvement (QI) initiatives similarly requires balancing descriptions of improvements achieved with assessments of potential costs and unintended consequences. Using balanced QI metrics allows simultaneous measurement of intended improvements (eg, reduced length of stay (LOS)) and of processes or outcomes that might worsen as a result of a given intervention (eg, mortality, hospital readmission). In their initiative to improve the efficiency of inpatient care without compromising safety at a large teaching hospital in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, McAlister et al1 report balanced measures, use a methodologically evaluative QI design, and describe the local contextual factors that influenced their success, thus creating generalisable knowledge.

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Early warnings, weak signals and learning from healthcare disasters – BMJ Quality and Safety

Some of the most urgent challenges facing those responsible for improving and regulating patient safety are therefore how to identify, interpret, integrate and act on the early warnings and weak signals of emerging risks—before those risks contribute to a disastrous failure of care. These challenges are fundamentally organisational and cultural: they relate to what information is routinely noticed, communicated and attended to within and between healthcare organisations—and, most critically, what is assumed and ignored. This article analyses these organisational and cultural challenges and suggests three practical ways that healthcare organisations and their regulators can improve safety and address emerging risks.

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To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home – Harvard Business Review

An interview is presented with Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University. Bloom discusses his research on the Chinese Internet travel agency Ctrip which found that telecommuting employees were both more productive and less likely to leave their jobs. He states that telecommuting saved Ctrip $1900 per employee in costs for the nine months of the survey. Bloom acknowledges his study involved call center employees, work that can be easily done at home.

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This weekly meeting took up 300,000 hours a year – Harvard Business Review Blog

Provides an example of an analysis of a company’s outlook schedules to support a weekly executive meeting. It then looks at the key organisational obstacles to poor time management.

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Power To The People: The Mutual Future Of Our National Health Service – ResPublica

This report argues that moving towards an integrated system of healthcare provision would make it possible to offer whole-person, holistic care to patients. It highlights the role mutuals could play in integrating public, private and third sector bodies to both improve patient outcomes and plug any funding gaps.

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Safe nurse staffing of adult wards in acute hospitals – National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

This draft guidance provides recommendations on safe staffing for nursing in adult inpatient wards in acute hospitals. The guidance was developed following the Francis and Berwick reports and aims to provide evidence-based guidance on safe staffing levels in hospitals. It also calls for hospital boards and senior management to take greater responsibility and includes step-by-step guidance on how to determine the number of nursing staff that should be funded. Feedback on the draft guidance is being sought from registered stakeholders until 10th June 2014.

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What Marketers Misunderstand About Online Reviews – Harvard Business Review

The article discusses the effect that user-generated online reviews and peer-to-peer information exchange through social media has on consumer behavior as of 2014, and recommends marketing strategies based on how consumers obtain and process product information. According to the article, managers must understand the influences that affect customers’ purchase decisions, including their prior preferences, beliefs, experiences, and input from others, which the article calls the “O continuum.” Competitive position, communication, market research, and product segmentation are also mentioned. INSET: Upending the “Compromise Effect”.

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blame – Harvard Business Review

The author looks at the psychological side of management, discussing his realization that thinking about and acknowledging his own contributions to organizational underperformance or other work problems is critical to getting employees to improve and generating positive business results. He notes his approach reduced his employees’ defensiveness and says it is valuable in personal as well as work relationships.

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Hartnett’s consensus-oriented decision-making model – Mind Tools

This is a tool to help teams come to an agreement when making a group decisions. It focuses on the inclusion of everyone in the group to encourage ownership of the final outcome and it promotes the creative process without judgement.

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The FOCUS model  – Mind Tools

This article outlines a structured approach to Total Quality Management. It utilises a team based approach to problem solving and process improvement. It provides tips for the application of the 5 step process.

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High-impact leadership: improve care, improve the health of populations, and reduce costs – Institute of Healthcare Improvement

An American white paper which aimed at supporting leadership across the healthcare sector to improve outcomes with their Triple Aim initiative. It focuses on three key elements: New Mental Models;High-Impact Leadership Behaviours; IHI High-Impact Leadership Framework. The white paper also includes examples from a variety of health care leaders, to help illustrate High-Impact Leadership Behaviors in real-world practice.

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The trouble with leadership theories – Harvard Business Review Blog

This reflection looks at how overuse of quotes from management gurus can hide true meanings in what we intend and how we can retain inspiration from the texts, but apply to our own environment and avoid the clichés.

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Leadership – Easier Said Than Done – Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)

This report explores general leadership issues and looks at the capacity of individuals at all levels of an organisation to buy into and lead on the organisational agenda, highlighting how misaligned organisational structures and processes can get in the way of leadership.

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A Taxonomy of Innovation – Harvard Business Review

The article considers innovation management and new product development. A framework for evaluating and categorizing different management methodologies created by the research institute Luma Institute is presented. Methodologies are formed in the framework into three large categories of research, analysis and implementation, with 12 subcategories with each large one. A chart is presented indicating the links between research, analysis and implementation in a successful innovation management process.

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Simplifying a complex system – British Journal of Healthcare management

Colin Jervis, an independent healthcare and management consultant argues that the NHS has many challenges to overcome to go ‘paperless’, and bring about a simplified system.

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 Attracting Top Contributors to an Open Innovation Project – Harvard Business Review Blog

This article looks at a paper recently published by researchers at Duke and the London School of economics  which aims to shed light on how to attract and motivate the best external contributors to an open innovation project.  is issue by studying contributions to open source software. It suggests that to attract the most productive contributors, companies may have to give up more control over their project. At the very least, they need to consider the values of the community they’re hoping to attract, and not just offer financial or professional incentives.

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NHS eProcurement strategy – Department of Health

Reprt providing details of actions to improve NHS data and information as part of the NHS Procurement Development Programme, which aims to help the NHS save £1.5 billion by the financial year 2015 to 2016.
The document also sets out how e-procurement can better support the NHS procurement processes that manage transactions and pricing with suppliers.

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3 Myths That Kill Strategic Planning – Harvard Business Review Blog

In its simplest form, strategic thinking is about deciding on which opportunities to focus your time, people, and money, and which opportunities to starve.   This articles examines three pervasive myths that continue to make strategic thinking an elusive skill set in today’s organizations.

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Monitor publishes a Guide to Special Measures – Monitor

NHS Trusts and NHS Foundation Trusts can be put into special measures where there are serious failures in the quality of care and there are concerns that the existing trust management cannot make the necessary improvements in quality without support.

The guide to special measures was developed jointly by Monitor, the Care Quality Commission and the NHS Trust Development Authority.

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Power to the people: the mutual future of our National Health Service – Kings Fund Health Management Policy Alert

This report argues that moving towards an integrated system of healthcare provision would make it possible to offer whole-person, holistic care to patients. It highlights the role mutuals could play in integrating public, private and third sector bodies to both improve patient outcomes and plug any funding gaps.

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Piercing the Illusion – The Health Foundation: Inspiring Improvement

‘Probably most of us think we are doing a good job… But how much of this is comfortable illusion?’ In her latest blog, Dr Jennifer Dixon suggests we are often blind to the quality of our own work. Which is why using intelligent data and measurement is central to improving quality – ‘from the “national” health system level, to the local, to the personal’.

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Delivering for Patients: the 2014/15 Accountability Framework for NHS trust boards

Improving quality for patients at a time of growing financial constraint is an increasingly demanding goal for NHS trusts, one which we must take on at a time when the scrutiny applied to the NHS is rightly more intense than ever before. This Accountability Framework sets out how the TDA will work alongside NHS trusts to meet this challenge.

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Wanted: an even Better Care Fund – The King’s Fund

The King’s Fund’s new analysis of serious and growing financial pressures in the NHS should serve as a wake-up call to politicians of all parties. Analysis shows that with an increasing number of providers in deficit, and the prospect of a further seven years of no growth in funding, the NHS is rapidly approaching a major crisis.

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Organizational impact of evidence-informed decision making training initiatives: a case study comparison of two approaches – Implementation Science ArticleOrganizational impact of evidence-informed decision making training initiatives: a case study comparison of two approaches – Implementation Science Article

The impact of efforts by healthcare organizations to enhance the use of evidence to improve organizational processes through training programs has seldom been assessed. This article endeavored to assess whether and how the training of mid- and senior-level healthcare managers could lead to organizational change. The article demonstrated that factors before, during and after training can influence the extent of skills and knowledge transfer. It reveals the influence–both positive and negative–of specific organizational factors on extending the impact of training programs.

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The Best Leaders Are Humble Leaders – Harvard Business Review Blog

In a global marketplace where problems are increasingly complex, no one person will ever have all the answers. That’s why Google’s SVP of People Operations, Lazlo Bock, says humility is one of the traits he’s looking for in new hires.  Rather than selecting those who excel at self-promotion, as is often the case, more organizations would be wise to follow the lead of companies like Google, Rockwell Automation, and others that are re-imagining what effective leadership looks like.

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Leadership.  Easier said than done – Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
This report explores general leadership issues and looks at the capacity of individuals at all levels of an organisation to buy into and lead on the organisational agenda, highlighting how misaligned organisational structures and processes can get in the way of leadership.

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Launch of Regional Innovation Fund – 1st May 2014

A Regional Innovation Fund (RIF) of £2.5m is available this year to support and promote the adoption of innovation and the spread of best practice across the NHS.
The fund is open to NHS England, as well as the NHS and AHSNs. All allocations made through the fund will seek to deliver significant improvements in quality and efficiency in the NHS through innovation. Bids can be developed alone, or through collaboration with other partners such as providers, local government, the third-sector, private healthcare and industry.

 The closing date for submitting applications is 5pm, Friday 30th May 2014. All allocations made through the fund will be allocated by end June 2014.

For more information on the RIF competition process and to access the RIF application form and guidance, please click here. 

Healing Medical Product Innovation – Rand Corporation

Many experts identify costly new technology as the biggest driver of health care spending. Previous studies aimed at reining in spending on technology have focused on changing how existing medical technologies are used. But what about also encouraging the creation of technologies that could improve health and reduce spending, or that provide large-enough health benefits to warrant any extra spending?

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How to Know When Your Great Idea is Ready for the World – The Discipline of Innovation Blog 

Timing is important in innovation, this blog post discusses the use of two tools:

1. The Technology Readiness Level – developed by NASA to evaluate technologies that they could use in their various programs.
2. The Investment Readiness Level – an adaptation to identify the investment readiness of an idea

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 Mobile app puts ‘doctor in your pocket’ – eHealth Insider

A mobile app lets users see their GP through video consultations and order prescriptions on their smartphone or tablet. Speaking at Wired Health, part of EHI’s Digital Health Festival, Ali Parsa, the creator of the ‘Babylon’ app, said he wants to provide people with a “doctor in your pocket”, and give patients access to GPs and specialist nurses six days a week.

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NHS eProcurement strategy – Department of Health

Reprt providing details of actions to improve NHS data and information as part of the NHS Procurement Development Programme, which aims to help the NHS save £1.5 billion by the financial year 2015 to 2016.
The document also sets out how e-procurement can better support the NHS procurement processes that manage transactions and pricing with suppliers.

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Wanted: an even Better Care Fund – The King’s Fund

The King’s Fund’s new analysis of serious and growing financial pressures in the NHS should serve as a wake-up call to politicians of all parties. Analysis shows that with an increasing number of providers in deficit, and the prospect of a further seven years of no growth in funding, the NHS is rapidly approaching a major crisis.

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How to make the NHS payment and pricing system work more effectively in 2015/16? – Kings Fund Health Management and Policy alert

Foundation Trust Network –
This briefing looks ahead at the changes NHS foundation trusts and trusts need in next year’s payment and pricing system to help them better manage the financial risks expected in 2015/16.  It highlights ten issues NHS England and Monitor need to take into account in setting this year’s payment and pricing system and five enablers for ensuring this process works effectively.

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Meeting the challenge: successful employee engagement in the NHS – Kings Fund

Involvement & Participation Association –
This report is based on case studies of employee engagement at eight high performing NHS Trusts. It identifies the approach and interventions associated with high levels of engagement, and provides some recommendations for trusts looking to drive up engagement. It concludes that only through effectively engaging with employees will the NHS be able to meet the challenges it faces in coming years. 

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Make Your Team Feel Powerful – Harvard Business Review Blog

Research has shown that helping others feel more powerful can boost productivity, improve performance, and leave employees feeling more satisfied on the job. A study conducted by Yona Kifer of Tel Aviv University and published in Psychological Science found that employees were 26% more satisfied in their roles when they had positions of power.
This article looks at the issue of empowering and engaging staff.

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Create a Work Environment That Fosters Flow – Harvard Business Review Blog

Everywhere we look in business, timetables once measured by calendars can now be clocked by egg timers. So how can we keep up? In a word — and according to an ever-increasing pile of evidence — “flow.”

Technically defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” the term takes its name from the sensation it confers. In flow, every action, every decision, arises seamlessly from the last. In this state, we are so focused on the task at hand that all else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Our sense of self vanishes. Our sense of time distorts. And performance goes through the roof. This article examines the application of ‘flow’ in the business environment.

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Data and Patient Safety – Are we asking the right questions? – The Health Foundation: Inspiring Improvement

John Illingworth looks at the enhanced role data and information will play in improving patient safety in the NHS, and introduces a new practical guide to implementing the framework for measuring and monitoring safety.

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This briefing follows a March 2014 speech by the Secretary of State for Health at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. In his speech, Jeremy Hunt MP set out a new ambition to reduce avoidable harm to patients in the NHS.

The NHS is facing the biggest challenge in its history because of the squeeze on its budget, says its new boss.

In a speech on his first day as NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, will say the health service is enduring the most sustained “budget crunch in its 66-year history”.

He will warn navigating the next few years will require a huge effort.

And he will say only by “radically transforming services” will the NHS continue to thrive

It’s virtually impossible to like everyone you meet. It’s even more unlikely that you will get along with everyone at work. People have different personalities, biases, values, ambitions, and interests, all of which affect the chemistry of their relationships. And if you throw in the pressures of the workplace, it’s hardly surprising that tensions arise between colleagues and co-workers. But when members of a senior management team don’t get along, the negative impacts can cascade through an organization. Those conflicts have the potential to reduce productivity and morale for dozens or hundreds of people.

 We are faced with the need to make decisions every day.  Should we bring product A or B to market?  Which marketing strategy should we use?  Of the choices that we have available, who is the best person to hire or who would make the best partner? In each case, we try to rely on as many facts as we can so that we can make a reasonable estimation of the best path to follow.  At first glance, the approach of weighing the evidence rationally seems perfectly reasonable.  Yet, in so many instances, rational predictions fail.  Why is that? And what can we do about it?

Do you often feel reactive instead of proactive? Do people complain that decisions at the top take too long to percolate down to the frontlines? If so, you probably manage your organization and your direct reports through weekly meetings and email. You should instead consider “leader standard work.”

 The article discusses research on quality-improvement actions and strategies that employers use to encourage employees to care about quality outcomes and to make quality a cultural value in the organization. The researchers found that leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement, and employee ownership are attributes which predict a corporate culture focused on quality. The discussion topics include making quality a leadership priority, delivering communications that appeal to workers, holding peers responsible for quality, and empowering workers to make quality decisions and to challenge directives that do not maintain or improve quality. INSET: THE FOUR ESSENTIALS OF QUALITY

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Evidence Services on 0151 285 4493.

As we move into 2014/15, the leadership challenge for NHS providers remains significant. Improving quality for patients at a time of growing financial constraint is an increasingly demanding goal for NHS trusts, one which we must take on at a time when the scrutiny applied to the NHS is rightly more intense than ever before. This Accountability Framework sets out how the TDA will work alongside NHS trusts to meet this challenge.

Additonal Information
Documents containing supporting guidance which provide further detail to help trusts understand the processes set out in the Accountability Framework.
http://www.ntda.nhs.uk/blog/2014/03/31/af2014/

“Local processes and professional and microsystem considerations played a significant role in adoption and implementation.”

Making sense of evidence in management decisions: the role of research-based knowledge on innovation adoption and implementation in health care
Y Kyratsis, R Ahmad, K Hatzaras, M Iwami, A Holmes
HS&DR, 2014, 6(2)

“Part of the reason why quality improvement is so hard to achieve may be that those involved in leading QI programmes need to deploy three different but interrelated types of improvement skills: technical, soft and learning skills.”

Skilled for improvement?
The Health Foundation
March 2014

“Recognising these different patterns should help identify at-risk diagnoses where quality of care can be improved in order to minimise the excess mortality associated with weekend admission.”

Do variations in hospital mortality patterns after weekend admission reflect reduced quality of care or different patient cohorts? A population-based study
O Perez Concha, B Gallego, K Hillman, GP Delaney, E Coiera,
BMJ Quality & Safety, 2014, 23:215-222

This paper sets out the Government’s response to the five recommendations directed to the Department of Health. The response can be divided into two sections:

• Recommendations relating to the NMC’s ability to conduct Fitness to Practice Proceedings
• Transposition of the Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications (MRPQ) Directive and the NMC’s ability to apply appropriate language controls to applicants

The article presents the author’s perspective on transformational management, noting that the transformation truths discovered by Liz Clairborne apparel company’s business teams include the idea that transformation is an era and not a short-lived moment or event in a company’s history. The management topics include sustaining a vision, building a brand, and reorganizing teams.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Evidence Services on 0151 285 4493.

The Learning Communities Initiative aimed to explore the use of organisational techniques such as learning communities and communities of practice. It set out to work with selected improvement groups in the NHS to help them learn collectively about proven improvement methods (‘improvement science’) and to examine how the learning process – and hence the enhancement of quality – could be better deployed in future improvement initiatives.

The four improvement groups proved very different in terms of their characteristics, cultures and processes, and the extent to which they achieved their improvement tasks. This report presents a detailed picture of the four contrasting improvement stories – which, in effect, proved to be a natural experiment – and analyses the reasons why there were such significant differences in what they achieved and how.

Aims to provide a toolkit that will enable a consistent approach, to be adopted across the NHS, for combating inflationary pressures.

NHS Providers are being advised by the Department of Health to resist blanket inflationary price increases from suppliers; an approach supported by both the Trust Development Authority (TDA) and Monitor. The NHS has been facing inflationary pressures well above the norm and increasingly NHS Providers are not receiving uplifts in budgets to cover such price increases. Our goal, as a minimum, is to ensure non-pay expenditure is inflation-free until at least the end of 2015-16, to keep a balanced budget and to continue to provide a quality service for patients by protecting the front-line.

This guidance has been developed with the support of a number of NHS Providers and includes some examples of best practice they have implemented to tackle these financial pressures. It is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to supplier management, but does provide some basic processes and templates to support
those NHS Providers who are embarking on implementing supplier management in their organisation.

Across the country, hospitals and primary and community care organisations are working together to look at ways of delivering safe and effective care over seven days a week. This helps address the link between poorer outcomes for patients and the reduced levels of service provision at the weekend.

This new publication summarises service improvement achievements and potential challenges. While significant progress has been made we need to strive to find new and innovative solutions that are both clinically and financially sustainable to change delivery of diagnostic and scientific services to meet the needs of service users.

A new coalition of people and organisations across the health, social care and voluntary sectors has been launched to make person-centred coordinated care for people with long term conditions a reality.

The Coalition for Collaborative Care is using an approach called the House of Care to improve care and support planning for the 15 million people in England who have a long term condition. That means improving the relationship that people have in their day-to-day interaction with the NHS and social care so their care and support is organised around what matters to them.

There are many social enterprises throughout the North West, with several being set up during the NHS transition, when Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) were closed down and services transferred to other organisations.They helped to ensure that the provision of certain services were sustained and even extended. This overview is intended to give a snapshot of such organisations, including  Bolton Community Practice Community Interest Company (CIC), Spiral Health CIC, Future Directions CIC and One to One Midwives.

Guidance from the Whistleblowing Helpline containing a number of recommendations, aiming to help make whistleblowing an important part of improving the quality of service user support and patient safety.

Report from Dr Foster Intelligence that calls on NHS England and the Health and Social Care Information Centre to improve the consistency and accuracy of data recording to improve monitoring of patient care.

The report note that calculating adjusted mortality ratios that take account of whether or not patients were admitted for palliation or treatment at the end of life are extremely useful to clinicians and managers of health services.

The ability to provide such information has been undermined in recent years by growing variation in clinical coding practices and a lack of rigour in the coding definitions. This report summarises the changes in coding practices in recent years.

British Journal of Nursing, Vol. 23, Iss. 6, 27 Mar 2014, pp 338

This series explores what reflection is and how it can be applied to your clinical practice. It examines some of the techniques that you can use to aid reflection and looks at portfolios, reflective learning and helping others to reflect.

Reflection: from staff nurse to nurse consultant. Part 4: Reflective feedback – (BJN Article request full text from Trust Library Services or call 01942 822508)

 Whistleblowing Helpline –
This guidance contains a number of recommendations, aiming to help make whistleblowing an important part of improving the quality of service user support and patient safety.

If you were asked to identify the most strategic and valued unit in your corporation, the procurement department would probably not come to mind. The term procurement itself has a very administrative connotation: It’s associated with buying ‘stuff’ for the lowest prices possible.

Today’s corporations are directing more and more of their budgets toward a complex web of global specialist providers and suppliers to help deliver on their businesses’ core strategies. A recently released global study of nearly 2,000 publicly traded companies found that 69.9% of corporate revenue is directed toward externalized, supplier-driven costs. In the last three years alone, companies have increased their external spend as a percentage of revenue by nearly 4%.

As a result, the role of procurement is magnified. Or, at least, it should be magnified. Suppliers must now be viewed as an extension of the company. Like the internal workforce, they must be incentivized, coached, sanctioned, and rewarded to help achieve corporate objectives.

However, procurement doesn’t register on the C-suite’s radar in a manner proportionate to its growing importance within the organization, and most procurement departments are neither ready nor empowered to take on their new responsibilities. This post gives some of the reasons for this.

 With the exception of “dyed-in-the-wool” unforgiving types (you know, the people who seem to delight in ruining family holiday dinners), one of the things nearly all of us are defenseless against is a sincere, earnest, unsolicited apology.

Despite its power, there are not a small number of people in this world who have never received one — and an equally sizable number of people who have never felt they owed one to someone. And yet for the majority of people, it’s disarming and intriguing enough to lower their guard to hear what the apologizer has to say.

If you’re unsure of the value in delivering a sincere, earnest, unsolicited apology, you need go no further than the neurology of mirror neurons.  Mirror neurons appear to help us with learning and empathy.  But they can also have a negative impact, such as when criticism triggers defensiveness (i.e. a reciprocal criticism from the criticized) and bared teeth trigger reciprocally bared teeth. In the case of a sincere, earnest, unsolicited apology, receptiveness begets more openness. Still too soft? You need look no further than conflicts you have successfully resolved at home with your spouses, children or parents… unless of course you truly believe that your “my way or the highway” approach to life has served you well.

So, I can’t guarantee that it will work, but if there is someone you work with that is not cooperating and with whom you would like to improve cooperation, it might be worth your trying. The sincere, earnest, unsolicited apology consists of five steps: