Putting patients at the heart of improvement

Annie Laverty is Director of Patient Experience at Northumbria Healthcare Trust and is also a GenerationQ fellow.

Her work on the Hospital Pathways Programme in Northumbria helped make care more person-centred for people with dementia, achieving impressive results and strong staff engagement. We explore her leadership approach and ask how successful patient and staff engagement can help create a supportive environment for improvement.

How does your organisation engage with the day to day experiences of patients?

At Northumbria, we listen to the views of more than 20,000 of our patients every year – it gives us a much greater awareness of how to develop responsive services.

We use a variety of approaches including surveys, storytelling, photography and focus groups to ensure that the voices of both patients and staff are at the heart of our improvement efforts. Approximately 400 patients are interviewed each month with results fed back to clinical teams within 48 hours, meaning we can react to feedback while patients are still in our care.

All this work is paying real dividends. In 2011 our outpatient care ranked within the top five hospitals in the country.

Why do you feel service user involvement is so important for improving healthcare?

Patient experience is now a fundamental part of how we think about the quality of healthcare. As service providers we can often assume we know what it’s like for service users, but actively finding out is critical when designing or changing a service.

I’ve frequently seen just how powerful and motivating this can be for staff. When they hear how patients experience their services, the need for improvement is immediately apparent and the case for change becomes compelling.

Your focus has always been on elevating patient experience issues to senior leadership, why is this so important?

At the National Patient Safety Conference recently I heard Gary Kaplan say that ‘attention is the currency of leadership’. For me, the attention of senior leaders in particular can often bring the influence and resources necessary to remove barriers that get in the way of improvement.

I’m incredibly fortunate in that my role reports directly to a chief executive who understands the business case for investing in patient experience and quality. I was appointed in December 2009 but in 2012 it is still very rare for patient experience to be the sole focus of a director-level post.

This strong senior support contributes to the success and sustainability of our improvement work. It’s also made it easier to adopt an organisation-wide approach, which is essential for lasting change.

What’s your next big project?

We are starting an ambitious project with the Health Foundation, working with corporate and clinical teams to focus on the needs of frail older people. We want all of our patients to feel valued and welcomed onto our wards and be confident that their complex needs will be understood by well trained and respected staff.

What skills and attributes do you think are vital to lead improvement projects?

Passion, resilience and perseverance together with an ability to cope with uncertainty all help! I’m also beginning to understand that I’ll be most effective as a leader when I focus less on being in control and more on being in charge of creating the right environment and conditions for different ideas, leaders and approaches to emerge.

How is being a GenerationQ fellow influencing your approach to leadership?

It’s making me more self aware, more curious and also more willing to listen to the shadow side of the improvement system instead of always trying to battle against it.

Understanding the theory is helping me develop new ways of viewing my organisation and health system. This reminds me that staying flexible and adaptable is really the only sustainable leadership strategy.