Enhancing voice – funding announced for new project
Speaking up is an essential part of improving patient care, making working conditions better for staff and identifying risks to patient safety, but NHS organisations can find it hard to support their staff in speaking up. Even when staff do share their concerns or ideas, acting on them effectively is often a problem.
The Enhancing Voice in Healthcare Organisations project will look at the whole ‘voice pathway’ – exploring how staff identify and raise concerns, how others hear and respond to them, and how organisations act on them. It will also work to develop ‘voice stewardship’ – helping organisations to treat staff voice as a valuable asset for improvement.
“Staff across all sorts of organisations have insights into day-to-day challenges and ideas about how to improve the quality of services, but healthcare organisations are often not very good at listening to them and using their insights for improvement. Sometimes, this has resulted in major problems that could have been averted if the concerns of staff had been heard. Through this project, we hope to learn from good practice in healthcare and other fields to develop practical ways for organisations to make better use of voice and support staff when they speak up.”
Graham Martin, THIS Institute Director of Research