Heartbeat: WeAllGetInvolved drives improvement in nuclear medicine and radiopharmacy

February 18, 2019

Medical imaging is a complex but important part of any hospital and it’s no different here. Nuclear medicine uses radioactive radiopharmaceuticals to create images of how different organs function in the body to help diagnose medical conditions and the process involves many colleagues, including radiopharmacists, physicists and technologists.

When so many different roles are working together, good communication and teamwork is essential and it was this communication strategy that was the topic of the poster that Bill Thomson, Consultant Physicist and Clinical Director submitted for the welearn poster competition.

The ‘WeAllGetInvolved’ communication strategy has seven stages; WeThink, WeWrite, WeMeet, WeDiscuss, WePlan, WeEmail and WeChat – Heartbeat caught up with Bill to find out more.

He said: “All the team are encouraged to come up with new ideas on how to enhance the existing service. They are then given freedom to share their ideas on a whiteboard, deliberately positioned in our staff room, for discussion at our QIHD meeting. This simple concept of the whiteboard drives our meeting agenda. So all colleagues are directly involved in setting the discussion points for our meetings.

“We meet and discuss the ideas at our local QIHD. Following on from these discussions we put together action plans on how we were going to take forward ideas we all thought were beneficial, usually through a small team.”

Bill and his directorate have already been able to make many improvements through this scheme.

“We’ve been able to achieve a lot as a result of getting everyone involved and feeling that they are directly able to make a difference.

“This has included introducing an automatic text messaging reminder service for outpatients to reduce DNA rates, developing an inventory of equipment that can be easily transferred to Midland Met when we move, standardising image protocols across the three gamma camera systems and researching a new meal recipe choice and normal range for gastric emptying which could become a UK standard procedure going forward.

“These changes made within the directorate have also helped contribute towards positive scores on latest ‘Your Voice’ survey with a 68 per cent response rate, 90 per cent involvement and 80 per cent motivation. All from a simple white board!”