How crowdsourcing is helping shape change in the NHS

Crowdsourcing is a great way of getting the best ideas for a large group of people. It's been used in a wide range of sectors and now is being trialled in the NHS, to help identify ways that change can happen more easily. Already, nearly 1,500 members of NHS staff have already helped identify both barriers to change and the building blocks of a supportive environment.

Hundreds of people have taken the time to comment and share their opinion on change via the Challenge Top Down Change experimental crowdsourcing project, run by NHS IQ with the HSJ, Nursing Times and crowdsourcing platform specialists, Clever Together. These opinions could potentially be used to shape change policy in the NHS.

When it comes to change, the NHS tends to take a traditional approach, with ideas for new ways of doing things often coming from senior executives - a top-down approach. The NHS needs new and better ideas so it is now time to enable bottom-up change.

Kate Pound, is transformation fellow with the NHS IQ team behind the project:

“This is such an exciting project for many reasons, but mostly because of the potential it has to shape how the NHS goes about change.

From the first phase, we saw how massive the appetite for rethinking NHS change is by the number of ideas and people getting involved on the platform.

If you contributed during the first phase, please do get involved and help us make turn your excellent ideas in to reality. If you haven’t contributed before – don’t worry – any ideas you have will be excellent.

This is a fantastic opportunity to help shape the NHS and to contribute to helping it adapt to the challenges which are ahead.”

We now have six days to share and prioritise the best solutions. Can you help?

• What solutions work? What approaches have you used or observed that others could learn from and copy? Please share your stories and learning about what did and didn't work.
• What solutions should we test? What ideas do you have that we could test out? Share ideas (these can be completely new) that you believe could support bottom-up change in the NHS, if we gave them a chance.

Head over to our Change Challenge page  to have your say, and create an account if you don't already have one.

The next stage of the campaign we will be inviting everyone to gather around the top-rated solutions, to expand and develop into a guide to empower all NHS staff to create better bottom-up change in their organisations.