Healthskills have been supporting WISMS (Wakefield Integrated Substance Misuse Service) with a programme of leadership development and service user engagement to achieve a radical change in care for substance misusers through positive and effective change in culture and leadership since 2007, in conjunction with a commercial partner, Schering Plough.
The aims of the project were:
At the recent meeting to evaluate the project:
WISMS become one of only 16 Department of Health Integrated Care Organisation (ICO) pilots during 2009 and Healthskills are now supporting Dr Linda Harris (Clinical Director) and her team in the move to a social enterprise organisation. If you would like to find out more about work supporting WISMS, Mark would be pleased to help you; mark.greenfield@healthskills.co.uk
Ann and Mark from Healthskills were delighted to be invited to present an award at NHS North West Leadership Academy’s Annual Conference and Awards, held at the Palace Hotel, Manchester on 26 May. Here is Mark presenting the award for Service Improvement through Leadership to Suzanne Lomax, Matron-Stroke at Royal Bolton Hospital NHS FT, together with John Humphrys from the BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme who chaired the conference.
The award recognised a leader who has transformed services through fundamental change, and Suzanne has demonstrated outstanding leadership in improving the patient end to end stroke pathway using the Bolton Improving Care System.
Our congratulations go to Suzanne and to all the other leaders we work with who use their skills to deliver better quality outcomes and experiences for patients.
Healthskills are delighted to be working with NHS South East Coast. We will be developing a learning hub to support the development of personal health budgets for long term conditions. This will involve creating a virtual learning environment using state of the art intranet technology, coupled with high quality and energised action learning. The work will start over the summer and Healthskills very much looks forward to working with Alison Lorimer and her team.
Healthskills are working with an Ambulance Trust with a remit to facilitate the rapid development of their Assistant Directors (ADs). There is a requirement to alter their behaviour. Obviously we could have done this in a variety of ways; workshops, action learning with reflection and one to one coaching all of which have their place. We wanted to do something differently though, something that made them alter the view that they had on their world in an authentic a way as possible. In short we wanted them to perform as different people within their own organisation. So we created a challenge for them to engage with using a “leadership relay” so no-one quite knows who will get the baton at different times; all are engaged and engrossed.
Picture the scene; there has been an outbreak of Norovirus and the system is in chaos. "Meat and drink" you would think to an Ambulance Trust but in this scenario the whole Executive team are off site and the ADs are now running the place and suddenly they are really running the organisation as the entire Executive team is hospitalised. The team are now engrossed in sorting out who is doing what and when; emergency scenario plans are being invoked at pace when suddenly they are summoned to the control room to watch a breaking "Health News" story. The whole system is in chaos it proclaims; a local celebrity has contacted them as she cannot raise an ambulance to a sick child. Health News want an interview and “need to know what’s going on” but the new management team haven’t the time for this until one member of the team suggests it maybe an opportunity for them to reassure people during the interview and to get a professional message across. A truly amazing moment as the Health News interview takes place and a leader’s outlook is changed forever. The final briefing note to the Strategic Health Authority Chief Executive who is about to meet with Andy Burnham is a breeze.
Changing their view on the world really worked and inspired them and generated a very exciting and insightful three hours.
Mary Okoth is a participant on our "Leading for Better Outcomes" programme at NHS Hammersmith and Fulham. She has been selected to join the "Breaking Through: NHS Top Talent" programme by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. 21 people were selected from 200 applications. She puts her success down to her learning from our programme.
Participants from the South East Coast NHS Ambulance Trust enjoying a recent leadership programme workshop:
Rather than sending out Christmas cards to our clients, colleagues and the wider team last Christmas, we sent an e-card, and gave a donation to www.wishes4kids.co.uk 
, a Leicester-based charity that makes dreams come true for terminally ill children. The charity sent us a lovely letter of thanks, and told us details of who the money went to help.
The HSJ Awards for 2009 were announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London on Monday 30th November. In the Primary Care Organisation of the Year category, NHS Tower Hamlets were Highly Commended, and were Finalists in the Good Corporate Citizenship Category. In the World Class Commissioning Category, NHS Wakefield District were Finalists.
Healthskills would like to congratulate both healthcare organisations for these excellent achievements and look forward to continuing our work with them in 2010.
