Innovation Manager at InnoScot Health, Fiona Schaefer looks at how best to inspire fresh innovation from a time-poor workforce
Successfully engaging an already pressured NHS workforce in fostering new ideas can be a challenging task but it’s one that all must be united in their commitment to achieving.
If done right, it’s also an exciting prospect with vast potential to shake up the health service and lay the foundations for an enduringly efficient and sustainable future.
Collectively making up a third of the country’s deeply skilled health and social care workforce, nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals (AHPs) are the vital backbone of the healthcare system with patients’ and families’ needs at the heart of everything they do.
These staff groups are therefore particularly well placed to use their knowledge to make a significant impact on ongoing aims to transform the NHS – whether improving patient care, enhancing working practices, or generating a financial return which benefits all.
When formal NHS Scotland partner InnoScot Health recently launched a fresh innovation push with the aim of inspiring nurses, midwives, and AHPs to come forward with innovative ideas, we did so knowing that the people we’re trying to reach represent a particularly busy section of the workforce.
They provide safe, effective, person-centred care and support across a variety of settings, routinely performing complex and skilled tasks while responding to a wide range of physical, clinical, and emotional needs.
This can mean anything from educating patients in helping them to understand their diagnoses and treatment and making difficult decisions on behalf of multi-disciplinary teams, to supervising and assessing junior staff, and helping to shape service development.
In other words, it can be a demanding job to say the least – but it can also be a very gratifying one when challenges are overcome and goals achieved, ultimately helping to make lives better.
We do, however, believe that the job satisfaction of pressured nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals (AHPs) can be improved through engagement in innovation – and that anyone can do it with the right passion, determination, and collaborative support.
The benefits for innovators alone are significant – recognition for being a forward-thinking asset to the workforce, empowerment from being part of a shared vision for improvement, and a sense of entrepreneurial achievement which could take your career to new places.
InnoScot Health aims to identify those with the right solutions and mindsets through engaging with individuals on a one-to-one basis while also understanding their personal circumstances which they may consider a blocker to realising their innovation aspirations.
Let’s be clear though – the biggest overall challenge for nurses, midwives, and AHPs is capacity.
Therefore, we need innovation that helps to make their jobs easier and more satisfying, aiding staff retention, while inspiring new people to join NHS Scotland.
We need fresh ideas that help staff to better manage the limited resources at their disposal, in turn producing greater efficiency and savings.
When there are patients in hospital with multiple conditions who want to be in their own home, then clearly a shift of focus from hospital to community care should be considered – but it must be a safe, carefully managed transition that offers many opportunities for innovation-driven solutions from those who best understand the practicalities.
Likewise, we have the ongoing shift from analogue to digital processes happening across the country, laying a platform for NHS standardisation while offering greater opportunities to leverage data. Innovation has a major role to play in harnessing opportunities to transition here to new and more effective pathways that can streamline staff processes and improve patient outcomes.
We know that community nurses are still finding that a lot of their time is spent on joining up care across the system.
Staff facing these sorts of challenges simply want time. Innovation targeted in the right areas could potentially give it back to them, bringing about improved wellbeing and protected learning time, amongst other benefits.
If successful, innovation can take on a life of its own; it gathers momentum. Staff talk to other staff and their advocacy is powerful when they believe in an innovation. You might be the nurse, m