Spreading improvement

Background

This toolkit is for people who have made improvements in healthcare. It teaches you communications techniques that can help you raise awareness of your improvement work and influence colleagues in your health board, across NHS Wales and beyond to adopt it in their setting.

Sharing your learning can help to provide recognition for your team and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues across Wales, as we all work together to provide safer care for patients. The training can form part of your continuing professional development and may contribute towards your revalidation or recertification.

The toolkit provides a step-by-step guide through the basic principles of effective communications and engagement for spread, which you can work through at your own pace. You are also able to click directly into the sections that you think will be most beneficial to you.

Objectives

Setting robust communications objectives is an important first step of communications planning that
can help the successful spread of your improvement.

When designing your objectives, think SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Your SMART objectives provide direction, help you consider what can be achieved and give you
something to measure so you can track impact and adapt your approach to help you achieve spread.

Use our resources to set appropriate objectives, then continue to use them as a guiding light when
planning communications for your spread project.

Identifying audiences

To understand who you need to engage with and influence to be able to spread your improvement, think about the people who can implement your improvement, or adapt it, in their work areas.

You are likely to have a few audience groups to engage for your improvement to spread successfully.

Once you’ve identified them, think about who influences their work and how they do it? Who has an interest in the improvement? What opportunities are there to contact them? What leaders or clinical leads need to be involved to make things happen?

Our resources for identifying your audiences will put you on track to finding the right answers.

Storytelling

Telling people about your successful improvement journey through storytelling can captivate and inspire them.

1. Stand out by hooking your audience with statistics or a compelling story.
2. Engage your audience and make them think.
3. Emotionally connect on a human level.
4. Be credible by sharing your honest achievements and challenges.
5. Inspire action with a clear call to action.

Use our resources to unlock the power of storytelling and find out how to reach and influence your audience with your story.

Implementation and Evaluation

Once you’ve made your plan for how you will use communications and engagement approaches to achieve the spread of your improvement, you need to think about how you’re going to put it into practice and monitor progress.

It’s about deciding how and when you’re going to implement everything you’ve planned to maximise your opportunity to influence your audience, knowing how you’ll assess the situation as you pass certain milestones, and having the flexibility to be able to react to any opportunities or risks that you identify for your spread activity along the way.

Our resource will help you design your implementation plan, and ensure you’re set up to track how things are going.