Creating compassionate culture, leadership and engagement
The Third Objective
Capitalises upon the huge body of evidence that demonstrates how culture, leadership and engagement with residents, staff communities and partners significantly impact upon the quality of services and patient experience provided. We have identified opportunities to make improvements in these areas that would then in turn lead to better outcomes. The Three Year Plan document in full, is available here.
Compassionate leadership and organisational development
Improvements in compassionate leadership and organisational development will allow faster improvement across the organisation, and greater staff satisfaction, leading to improvements in patient experience and outcomes.
A key part of this work will be to approve and implement the organisation’s Leadership Development Framework. There will be a strong focus on compassionate leadership, which involves a focus on relationships through careful listening to,
understanding, empathising with and supporting other people, enabling them lead to feel valued, respected and cared for so they can reach their potential and do their best work. This is an evidence-based approach leading to strong and resilient teams.
Importantly, compassionate leadership is not an end in itself; there is a strong body of evidence demonstrating that a compassionate leadership culture generates better outcomes from staff across the organisation.
Embedding the right culture across the Health Board will be critical to our success in achieving the ambitions set out in the three-year plan. This will mean engaging with all staff across North Wales to ensure they can contribute to its success. Work to strengthen engagement across all staff groups will continue alongside a range of organisational development activities to bring about a strong and inclusive culture. This will lead to a better experience for both our staff and patients.
Hundreds of our leaders from across the Health Board have already attended events to develop and support strong and compassionate leadership as part of a wider organisational development programme.
Citizen engagement
Meaningful engagement, strong relationships, partnerships and communication are at the heart of building trust and confidence in the quality of care and services, and intrinsic to our journey of improvement and developing care to meet the needs of its population.
Capturing, analysing and triangulating the valuable feedback from citizens and working with them to shape improvements will demonstrate that they are fundamental to the development and improvement of care and services. This way of working will embed listening and engaging into our strategic approach.
New and more targeted ways of engaging with communities across North Wales are being developed to allow more continuous two-way engagement to take place. This will give people improved opportunities to interact with us on matters where they have an interest and inform decision making around plans for the future. It will also give people a more powerful voice.
All of this feedback gathered through day-to-day interactions with patients, their carers and families, conversations with the public and partners in their communities and at events, correspondence from Members of the Senedd and Parliament and other activities will be shared with the Board regularly in a new Citizen Experience Report.
We will build a wide-ranging engagement programme with communities across North Wales, providing opportunities to ask questions and find out more about the plans for the future.
Being a good partner
Partnership working is an area that we wish to improve upon, noting that working in true partnership has not always been prioritised in the past. We want to develop and support new and existing relationships so that partners are involved and are shaping solutions to the shared complex and difficult issues. We recognise the importance of agile decision-making.
The complex challenges in terms of population health and care needs being seen not only in North Wales, but across the UK as a whole, can only be tackled through a whole system approach. This requires effective working relationships with Local Authorities, Third Sector and Charitable organisations, Housing Associations, Universities and Higher and Further Education partners, neighbouring Health Boards and the NHS in England. Furthermore, all evidence points to the solutions to these challenges being markedly better when understood as across our system partnerships.
We will seek to achieve greater integration of services, shared approaches to improving the wellbeing of the population and innovative and transformative ways of working that tackles much wider social, economic and environmental factors. Working in this way will enable a shared values approach, where community is at the heart of decision-making.
We will continue to engage with partners across the North Wales region to meet these challenges and improve the health and wellbeing of our population.