Title of driver: White Paper: the new era of thinking and practice in change and transformation: a call to action for leaders of health and care
Source: NHS Improving Quality
Publication format: Available as PDF and e-publication
Date of publication: July 2014
Summary of driver:
This paper examines trends in change and transformation from multiple industries, and argues that change needs to happen at a faster rate and become more disruptive.
The paper tries to identify the implications and opportunities for leaders of health and care, including embracing disruption and ‘disruptors’ to create an environment where innovation is encouraged. It provide leaders of change with 15 actions to support change, and makes available ideas, opinions, research and resources about the future direction of change.
Key features of driver:
The paper asks several questions about organisational and system change, including:
- Who does it (many change agents, not just a few)
- Where it happens (increasingly ‘at the edge’ of organisations and systems)
- The skills and mindsets that change agents need
The paper also includes four case studies:
- Living Well in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – Striving for a collective humility in finding a way to work together for the person’s benefit
- A grass-roots movement sparked by students coming together to prevent avoidable pressure ulcers
- The NHS Change Day ‘hubbies’: a voluntary self-organising network of local leaders
- The School for Health and Care Radicals – teaching change agents to rock the boat and stay in it
Primary audience: Leaders in health and care
Impact on library policy/practice:
One of the five enablers of the ‘emerging direction’ in change outlined in the paper is ‘Curate rather than create knowledge’. It suggests that improvement leaders will need to become curators of knowledge (collecting, filtering, evaluating, contextualising and sharing knowledge from multiple sources) and this will include more tacit knowledge or ‘know-how’ in future.
This might mean library staff supporting the knowledge management agenda in their organisations, or supporting leaders to use the necessary tools to curate knowledge (which could include applications such as Twitter, Storify and LinkedIn).
In one sense curation of knowledge is something we already do in literature searches, and we already teach users how to collect and filter knowledge using traditional tools such as bibliographic databases. It may be that we simply need to rebrand some of what we do, or extend it to cover new tools.
Digital skills will become increasingly important for leaders, and again this may involve library staff in providing training and support for non-traditional information resources and applications.
Date last updated: October 2014
Due for review: October 2015
Group member responsible: JC
Tagged: Innovation, Leadership, Quality and Improvement