Rewarding, and acknowledging excellence is one way of encouraging excellence, but also a way of noticing what has gone well, and there are loads of examples of this on fabnhsstuff already.
We wanted to introduce excellence reporting in our department, and looked at all the available options before initiating this.
First up, we wanted to avoid negatives / problems associated with this - would it cause any problems?
How Did We Avoid Problems?
- Some suggest this could quickly become a competitive and toxic process, although this is a hypothetical problem, and not reported in any of the areas that have implemented excellence reporting.
- Some suggest that it could be twisted to become a requirement, or expected - appraisals might mention that you haven't got any ERs...why not?
- learningfromexcellence, who have used reporting quite a lot, suggest that by making results of report private ie only known to the individual, this reduces the competitive nature and prevents this so we did this.
- There are some thoughts that if you implement greatix or reverse datix (incident reporting), you imply that a datix is a negative and bad thing to complete. This is not something we want to do, so we didn't call our excellence reporting greatix.
- Some suggest that people will go to self sacrifice lengths, decreasing their wellbeing to get a exception report eg. x stayed an hour late because we were so busy. Other departments with many reports state they haven't noticed this happening. We have seen a few reports of this, and we've actioned them as we normally do, but with words of caution.
What's in a Name?
We discounted IRIS or reverse SIRI (Improving Resilience, Inspiring Success) as it seemed complicated.
Greatix we didn't use incase it upset the datixes.
FERF was a consideration but we wanted to be unique!
We called our reports Positive Event Reports (PERs).
A PER sounds like a nice soft and friendly noise (a bit like a cat) and was unique to our unique hospital!
What do we do?
Simply, people email our PER email address...the results get logged and PERs emailed out.
We encourage the reportee and the reported to reflect on their PER using the learningfromexcellence questions.
How do people know about it?
We advertised with posters.
We gave "welcome to the ED" cards to all the new Doctors starting
We stapled the PER email address to tea and coffee so people could drink, relax, and complete a PER!
We left cake in the department - with a contract "sealed" by eating the cake - that meant the eater would notice and report excellence!
If PERs were sent to people outside of the department, we sent a copy of the "FAQs" with them
We hoped people would know more about PERs once they completed a PER - we actually didn't see an increased reporting trend!
Where do I read more?
I have attached some of the key resources from learningfromexcellence, with some FAQs, and some top tips for getting started.
They've suggested we keep it simple...and see what happens!
There are loads of good other resources:
http://learningfromexcellence.com/blog/
http://adc.bmj.com/content/101/9/788.full
https://www.ferf.co.uk/