Enabling Improvement in Healthcare

Enabling improvement in healthcare is what the FCA course ‘Improving with people first’ and programme is all about. We thought we’d share with you what we think are the key ingredients.

• Motivation, Commitment & Leadership
• Engagement & Collaboration
• Cohesive methodology
• Teams with Coaching capability
• Time & psychological safety

All improvement requires moving motivation and ideas towards engagement and collaboration with a coherent and cohesive method. Sustaining the work, in a meaningful way, that moves cultures toward ones of continuous improvement takes time, commitment, and leadership

Nick Miller, Head of the Flow Coaching Academy

Even in the toughest of times we know colleagues are motivated and passionate about making improvements. Often, we notice an abundance of ideas about how to do things differently and a frustration that it feels so difficult to move these ideas into action. This frustration is a huge loss of opportunity for the NHS.

Being part of the FCA has restored my faith in individuals and teams to effect change. It has helped me to channel my enthusiasm for change into action and, even better, I’m helping others do the same.

Laura-Jane Smith
Consultant Respiratory Physician at Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The FCA believes their course ‘improving with people first’ provides individuals, teams and organisations with an approach and a cohesive methodology that provides the structure and facilitates the engagement and collaboration needed to harness motivation into sustained action. We build improvement capability with the people who do the work and harness the insight of those who experience the care. This strong union offers the chance to acknowledge frustration and provide a roadmap that offers hope that positive change is possible.

I hope the FCA can help spread this philosophy of how to work. Data matters, Methodology matters, Engagement matters, Kindness matters, Inclusion matters. This is how we create agency in our workforce and communities.

Sabrina Das
Consultant Obstetrician & Gynaecologist at Imperial

At the heart of our methodology is the Big Room, a collaborative space that brings together a wide range of people who work within or are connected to a patient pathway. Most importantly this Big Room is coached by a clinician, from within the pathway, and an independent coach both trained as a pair in the FCA way. This unique focus on team coaching for improvement develops the relational leadership skills needed to harness the collective brilliance in others, maintain engagement and create an environment that facilitates collaboration and transformation.

The Flow Coaching Academy improvement road map provides coaches and Big Room participants with direction. It guides coaches and Big Rooms through a logical sequence of steps from assessment through to testing and standardisation in a continual process. Whilst presented as a stepwise process the roadmap offers flexibility dependant on context in which it is being applied which brings a freedom that traditional projects and programmes struggle with.

The Big Room is more than a meeting space, it’s a way of being and it touches all that encounter its coaches, participants and work. Embedding a culture of continuous improvement takes time and requires organisations to be willing to fail and learn and commit to the creation of psychologically safe working environment. We know from our independent evaluations that our methodology goes a long way to create this safety. We also understand that a supportive, authentic and actioned leadership at all levels is an essential driver of success.

I am so grateful to the FCA for everything I have learned and the opportunity to make a difference, but more importantly than anything, for creating a space for me to be human again. You have been like a safety blanket.

Eleni Maratos
Consultant Neurosurgeon at Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust