Tag Archives: good practice

Explore our Innovations during Libraries Week 2018

Quality and Impact, ,

As we celebrate Libraries Week 8th – 13th October 2018, we take another look at the innovative work of our health Library and Knowledge Services through the lens of this year’s top ten Sally Hernando Innovation Award entries.  The winners were announced earlier in the year at Health Libraries Group Conference in Keele:

1st Place “Lean method, live update- real-time librarian support for evidence-based practice in radiotherapy clinical protocols” submitted by Carol-Ann Regan – Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust

Details the work of a clinical librarian introducing a new method for updating radiotherapy (RT) clinical protocols to the latest evidence in a time efficient way.

2nd Place “Evidence Bites: Patient Safety Evidence Summaries” submitted by Victoria Treadway – Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The Library & Knowledge Service produces evidence summaries following the weekly Trust-wide Safety Summit which are disseminated across the organisation.

 3rd Place “Understanding the Person: Insights into the Patient Experience” submitted by Kaye Bagshaw – Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Explores the work of the Newcomb Library in collecting books to facilitate understanding of patients, carers, service users and caregivers by healthcare staff.

Other entries from the top ten, in no particular order, are:

Why not use this Libraries Week as an opportunity to explore these pieces of work and reflect on whether they might contain elements which may be relevant to your local work?

For further information see Innovation awards

Building on good metrics

Metrics TaF, Quality and Impact, ,

The Metrics Task and Finish Group is happy to able to share the results of their work looking at principles for good metrics.  You can read our report now on the TaF Reports page.

The goal of this report was to create a shared understanding of what makes a good metric.  Through examining practice within NHS libraries and elsewhere we agreed a set of four core requirements.

* Meaningful

* Actionable

* Reproducible

* Comparable

There is more detail about what each of these means in practice in the report so do give it a read.

To build on the report we now want to encourage the recognition, creation and sharing of good metrics.  To this end we have also prepared a Quality Metrics Template. This is a brief document that can help you structure your thinking as you consider a metric. It also provides the kind of information others would need to be able to see if your metric will also work in their setting.  Please do share your completed templates with us – you can drop them in an email to alan.fricker@kcl.ac.uk as we work out how best to present and share them.  Hopefully we should have some to share with you shortly.

 

Hello from the Knowledge Management Task and Finish Group

Knowledge Management TaF, Service Transformation, , , , , , , ,

We are one of the task and finish groups within the Service Transformation workstream, and our remit is to help define the approach to improve the involvement of library and knowledge services (LKS) with organisational knowledge management (KM).

Knowledge for Healthcare defines KM as: the creation and management of an environment which encourages knowledge to be gathered, shared and used efficiently and effectively within an organisation to develop, improve performance and avoid errors.[1]

It became clear early on that we cannot simply prescribe a single standard, or compel services to take a particular approach. Rather, we need to provide practical support and inspiration for services to improve their KM involvement – by sharing the good practice the already exists, and sharing models to help services understand what improved KM involvement might look like for them, as well as the benefits of increasing their activity in this area.

The group has begun scoping some examples of good practice, with the aim of producing a “toolkit” of approaches to suit different organisational climates, or current service provision. So, if you’re completely new to KM you can pick a straightforward example and implement that. If you’re already involved in KM but would like to develop this further, the toolkit can provide more advanced examples or ideas for different approaches. The aim is overall improved compliance against LQAF 5.4a, and for those services already fully compliant but who are feeling ambitious, some ideas or challenges to take their KM activity further and, in doing so, raise the profile of their service and improve KM in their organisation, so everybody benefits.

We have identified a link with the Workforce Planning and Development group to ensure we are providing input, as clearly one of the enablers for improving KM activities is ensuring LKS staff have the skills (and confidence) to step up their KM activities.

If you have any questions, comments or ideas you can contact us via the group chair, Emily Hopkins: emily.hopkins@nw.hee.nhs.uk

Members of the group

Rachel Cooke, Surrey & Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

Emily Hopkins, Health Education North West (Chair)

Jackie McGuire, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Nick Smith, Worcestershire Health Libraries

Caroline Storer, Health and Social Care Information Centre

Laura Wilkes, West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust

[1] Health Education England (2014) Knowledge for Healthcare: a development framework, p56 http://hee.nhs.uk/wp-content/blogs.dir/321/files/2014/12/Knowledge-for-healthcare-framework.pdf