October is Speak Up Month
October 21, 2020
October is Speak Up Month and this year, the National Guardian’s Office is drawing up an Alphabet of Speak Up. There are 26 letters of the alphabet and 26 days to explore the issues, the people, the values, the challenges – everything which goes into what Freedom to Speak Up means in health. When things go wrong, we need to make sure that lessons are learnt and improvements made.
This year we will be supporting the National Guardian’s Office looking at the alphabet of speak up, with each day identifying a word and what that means to colleagues across the Trust. We are encouraging managers to use this as an opportunity for discussion with your colleagues and team. Speaking up is an important part of a culture that focuses on safety and quality, and we would like you and your teams to play a part in encouraging these conversations to be part of who we are and how we work.
Today’s letter is provided by Ruth Spencer, Associate Director for Quality Assurance
Q is for Quality
Throughout my working life I have met some wonderful people in the NHS and I have learned that ultimately our staff want to do a fantastic job when they come to work. Everybody wants to make a difference and we all want to work in an organisation that is outstanding.
As part of our journey to outstanding, we have been taking part in quality and safety improvement visits across the Trust. These visits are helping us to identify what we do really well, but also to highlight areas that we need to improve. As part of this process I have been really keen for staff to be able to share their experiences of working in our Trust, and how they see quality improvement as part of their every day working life. Sometimes we spot things that require improvement, and we can see how making small changes could improve things greatly for our patients, and also for our colleagues. Enabling our staff to feel confident in raising any concerns they may have is an important part of this journey if we are to move forward and progress with our improvement work.
It takes a very brave person to speak up, and supporting our staff to have Freedom to Speak up is vitally important. But more than that, I have learned that we also need to listen to what staff are telling us, we need to listen to their concerns, and we need to act upon them. If a member of staff has been brave enough to speak up and then we do nothing, what would be the point? By supporting our staff to share their concerns with us, and then by acting to put things right this will allow us to greatly improve patient safety, improve the quality of care and treatment that we provide, improve the experience for staff and patients across the organisation and to take those steps towards becoming outstanding.