The Emergency Department had recently undergone significant change, including a new triumvirate structure and the development of the Emergency and Urgent Care group.
This identified the need for need for a dedicated Governance structure within the Emergency Department.
Historically CQC reports had identified a lack in Governance maturity.
Completion of phase one was the recruitment of a Governance Manager in August 2019.
This led to the beginning of the formation of the governance structure and governance processes.
Part of this work was for the education and the governance team to unite and collaborate to not only support staff in the forthcoming changes, but to also share learning by providing staff with an energising, united and simulated programme of events.
We needed to progress with pace to begin establishing a robust governance process that not only incorporated learning for staff, but when setting our priorities for improvement we were aware that the outcome must help to ensure the department delivered safe, effective and timely care for our patients.
We felt it was important to not work in silos as teams but to collaborate.
We had a backlog of incidents that required investigation and we needed to gain oversight of actions that were the outcome of Investigations following the reporting of serious incidents and improvement work.
We knew that it would take 6 months to begin to see positive progress but had the timeframe of one year to begin to successfully begin to notice the impact of this and establish new initiatives that would become business as usual- this is when GOVERNATION was created.
The idea of Governation came from our education lead – this idea grew and we used a PDSA cycle with the formation of our Patient safety group and action evidence groups to develop a programme of learning for governation.
Patient safety group is an initiative that became even more successful during covid-19 measures at outreached to staff who were home working/ shielding and kept them engaged and ensured they remained very much part of the team. It was accessible via teams, which also ensured that our external partners and colleagues within our trust could attend. This was a real success during covid.
A recent Emergency and Urgent Care regional STP day was completed where we were able to collaborate with our STP colleagues in order to progress with the hope that the final outcome will result in the formation of an Emergency network forum. This was successfully delivered by the Governance and Education team. This has resulted in the hope to use flashsim as a method of delivering simulation to improve the safety, effectiveness and efficiency- we are really proud that the day has led to the request to collaborate not only cross divisionally but regionally with our NHS colleagues.
You can watch the Quality Summit video HERE