International Women’s Day – Women in Improvement

Marjorie Godfrey

It seems fitting to start this list with the woman whose work supported the development of the FCA programme, Marjorie Godfrey. Marjorie is a Research Professor in the Department of Nursing and Executive Director and Founder of the Institute for Excellence in Health and Social Systems (IEHSS). She is an international leader in designing and implementing improvement strategies targeting the place where patients, families and care teams meet – the clinical micro, meso, macro and metasystems.

Marjorie began her work in clinical microsystems over 25 years ago. Her doctoral studies focused on developing improvement capability, leadership to lead change and the phenomenon of coaching interprofessional teams in health care improvement. She is a co-author of multiple books including ‘Quality by Design’ and ‘Value by Design’.

Marjorie helped us establish The Microsystem Academy in Sheffield. She then further aided us to embed team coaching and quality improvement work which then became the Flow Coaching Academy. She has brought both academic rigour and frontline knowledge from her nursing background to the programme and has been generous to share this throughout our journey of two-way learning.

Lillian Gilbreth

Born in 1878, Lillian Gilbreth was one of the early innovators in the field of industrial engineering and is best known for introducing and applying Social Sciences to industrial work. Lillian earned a PhD in applied psychology in 1915, making her the first of the pioneers of industrial management to have a doctorate. Her and her husband Frank contributed significantly to the study of efficiency focussing on time-and-motion studies and various human factors – they emphasised the importance of looking at the worker rather than the machine.

After her husband’s sudden death in 1924 she found, alongside raising 11 children, her influence was significantly hindered by gender discrimination and adapted her work to the more female-friendly home economics and making women’s roles in the home easier. However, she also persevered with engineering continuing to write, research and teach and eventually carving out a niche with work that is still hugely influential to this day.

Martha Hayward

Martha is a founding board member of the non-profit Women’s Health Exchange which strives to improve education and awareness for women’s health in the USA. Her career experience includes over 30 years in marketing and fundraising in the areas of health, politics, and education. In 2011 she joined the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) as the Lead for Public and Patient Engagement. As a cancer survivor herself, Martha is passionate about better embedding patient-focussed thinking across organisations and how valuable patient stories can be for Healthcare improvement.

Nancy Kline

Nancy Kline created and pioneered the development of ‘The Thinking Environment’ and founded ‘Time To Think’ an established Leadership Development and Coaching company which grew out of her consulting and teaching work in the 1980’s. Her method of teaching people how to produce independent thinking in their organisations, teams and lives has proven very popular and she has published multiple books including ‘More Time to Think: The power of independent thinking’ and ‘Women and Power: How Far Can We Go?’. Nancy was awarded by the International Listening Association the Listener of the Year Award in 2010.

Laura Semple

Laura is Assistant Director of Improvement Programmes at The Health Foundation where her work focusses on testing and scaling proven quality improvements in health. Laura joined in June 2020 after a range of senior operational and strategic roles throughout the NHS such as Programme Director for Diabetes & Cardiovascular at Health Innovation Network, the Academic Health Science Network for South London where she led a new collaborative network with a focus on improving access to technology and first-class support for self-management.

She also has a strong interest in Global Health, having spent time working in a hospital in Sierra Leone where she helped to set up quality improvement work in Malaria. She then set up the role of NHS Engagement Lead for King’s Global Health Partnerships and Kings College London working directly with NHS Executive colleagues to deliver a new approach to global health volunteering.

Helen Bevan

Helen Bevan is the Chief Transformation Officer for the NHS and has worked across the NHS for over 25 years in a variety of roles. During this time Helen has been at the forefront of many improvement initiatives and is acknowledged globally for her work in large scale Healthcare change including in cancer services, urgent and emergency care, services for people living with dementia and care in the community.

She currently leads the Horizons team who champion the role of emerging leaders, students and trainees at the forefront of radical change through approaches such as social movement thinking and improvement science. Helen is very active online and is one of the top social influencers in healthcare globally, you can follow her work in the Horizons team here – https://twitter.com/HorizonsNHS