28 November 2016

Happy app-roach to staff engagement wins HSJ award

The team behind an innovative website which allows staff at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust to provide feedback about their mood and what is going right and wrong have won a prestigious national award.

On 23 November they were announced as winners of the Staff Engagement category at the HSJ Awards 2016 ceremony, which took place at the Intercontinental O2 in London.

The app was developed by two consultants, Andy Hollowood and Anne Frampton, who wanted to explore the link between staff satisfaction and patient care.

They wanted to develop a method of gauging staff morale and encouraging colleagues to give feedback to their local managers so any issues raised could be addressed as quickly as possible.

It was launched in 11 locations in September 2015 after an eight-month trial in Bristol Royal Hospital for Children's emergency department, ward 30 and the surgical and trauma assessment unit.

The app uses emoji-style symbols that everyone is familiar with to capture mood - a happy, neutral or sad face - and allows the user to expand on their mood by adding a comment. The website also allows staff to view published comments submitted by their peers and the responses to them from their managers.

The website can be accessed from a variety of devices across the hospitals, including Trust PCs, iPads and self check-in kiosks.

Each location has one or more 'administrators', generally the matron, sister or line manager in charge, who receive comments, publish them to the website and can respond to them. They are asked to respond to comments within 48 hours, in order for this system to be effective.

The HSJ Awards 2016 judges said:

"We were bowled over by this simple approach which demonstrably shifted behaviour and culture in clinical teams.

"The immediacy of feedback and of action, coupled with clinical ownership, is very powerful."

Anne Frampton, a consultant at the Bristol Royal Infirmary emergency department, said:

"We were incredibly proud to attend these awards on behalf of University Hospitals Bristol, which represent a fantastic achievement resulting from much hard work and enthusiasm.

"We would like to thank the many teams at the Trust who helped implement and roll out this tool, as well as our partnership with NIHR CLAHRC West who worked with us throughout the process to evaluate the website."

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