Our role in improving health and social care

Animate partners Joette and Jo became Improvement Associates with Health Improvement Scotland last year. Here they reflect on their experiences and learning.

Health Improvement Scotland is the agency tasked with driving improvements that support the highest possible quality of care for the people of Scotland. Their Improvement Associates support local and national projects identified by HIS which help partners to achieve the nine national health and wellbeing outcomes.

The application process to become an Improvement Associate was onerous, but it really got us thinking. Not only did we have to detail our experience but we had to describe our approach to improvement, how we defined the effectiveness of our practice and what we had learned.

We are now part of a team of around 30 practitioners with various skills who are supporting health and social care integration in one way or another.  We get together every few months to hear from Health Improvement Scotland about their priorities and to share our sense of what is happening around integration across the whole which gives us an interesting oversight.

Jo is facilitating the What Matters to You Social Movement gatherings, for all those involved in person centred working and co-production, which culminate in an event for up to 250 people at the end of February. For more information go to www.popaopenday.eventbrite.co.uk

We are also working on a couple of projects in collaboration with Cathy Sharp. The first one is an evaluation of the Real Time/Right Time initiative which involves a few health boards in Scotland experimenting with getting and acting on feedback from patients about the care they are receiving immediately or very soon after treatment. Patients are asked directly about their care, either by a nurse on the ward or by another practitioner. We are visiting hospitals in Glasgow and Lanarkshire to find out more about how they are getting on.

The second project, which kicks off shortly, is taking us into new territory…looking at what care homes have been doing to  reduce pressure ulcers.