What does ihub stand for

When I started my new role as an Assistant Programme Advisor with the Healthcare Staffing Programme HSP in August , our team had started to re-group after being redeployed to work in the first phase of the pandemic. It was an exciting time to join my nursing and midwifery colleagues as they worked to support territorial boards with remobilisation and recovery. Reconnecting with our NHS colleagues to learn from the challenges they faced was going to inform our objectives for the year ahead.

Health and care services were faced with the parallel demands of COVID care and the urgent roll out of the vaccination programme. Having heard about these challenges from frontline colleagues, I volunteered to provide enhanced support to vaccination programme staffing with NHS Western Isles. My clinical background is as an Allied Health Professional AHP , but even with my knowledge of workload and workforce planning, I was anxious about whether I would be able to offer the right level of support to nursing colleagues given the pressures of vaccination targets.

Working with clinical staff, senior nurses, Public Health Scotland colleagues, clinic schedule coordinators, health intelligence colleagues and the local Quality Improvement coordinator, I began to learn about the landscape in which we were having to plan vaccinations.

Something that immediately jumped out at me was the multiprofessional nature of the vaccination staffing effort, and the importance of professional judgement and clinical voice when staffing new services. I saw so many AHPs, from paramedics and podiatrists to dietitians and speech and language therapists, working to support the vaccination effort while also trying to maintain their own services. Nationally, the pandemic response has highlighted how staffing affects healthcare quality and staff wellbeing across health and social care.

In keeping with the principles of the Health and Care Staffing Scotland Act , and ahead of its enactment, NHS Boards have to have systems in place to ensure professional advice has been provided at the right level in relation to staffing.

Where decisions are made contrary to such advice, associated risks should be identified, recorded and any required mitigation put in place. With this principle in mind, I worked with my vaccination programme colleagues to map out the current vaccination clinic process, highlighting key staffing risks to allow us to prioritise staffing and workload improvements. For example, observing workflow at vaccination clinics and joining the morning safety huddle helped me to understand the key staffing issues that were impacting patient safety and staff wellbeing.

The mapping process helped to identify simple changes to rostering processes that helped to improve the skill mix and effective use of staff during their allocated shift times.

Overall the changes were well received by the vaccination staff on the ground as they felt more engaged in staffing discussions and their concerns about patient safety and staff wellbeing were heard.

The increased governance and flexibility gave the staff more ownership of their workload and helped to make the best use of their time. Importantly, the changes also protected rest break times and safe working hours to maintain staff wellbeing. My experience and that of many of my colleagues is that the pandemic has demonstrated that multi-professional collaboration and improvement are possible in the most challenging of circumstances.

However, as we move towards what is, hopefully, the beginning of the end, it has also highlighted the need for AHPs to have a consistent way to capture their workloads and to use reliable workload information to plan their services and workforce. This is where my team at Healthcare Improvement Scotland comes in. We support the upskilling of a range of professions in workload measurement to help ensure that their services are safely staffed for high quality care.

We want to help AHPs understand the importance of knowing their available workforce and identifying gaps in their required workforce, and to explore practical, low data burden solutions to workload and workforce measurement. Visit our website for more information on the Healthcare Staffing Programme.

Many people will know the term Caldicott Guardian but perhaps not quite know what it means. In our latest blog, George Fernie, Senior Medical Reviewer with our organisation, outlines the role and what it means for respecting the rights of patients.

The term Caldicott Guardian is one that many people will have heard of, but perhaps not entirely know what it means or where it comes from. It describes the role as:. Caldicott Guardians. The term is named after Dame Fiona Caldicott who died earlier this year having worked with some distinction as an NHS psychiatrist.

These six Caldicott principles have since helped Caldicott Guardians to make balanced judgements for their organisations, with a seventh being added in and an eighth in Describing the role of Caldicott Guardian is easier to explain, however, than the journey I took to become one! In Healthcare Improvement Scotland, the role of Caldicott Guardian has been devolved to me because of my long-term interest in medical law and ethics.

A further opportunity to combine law, ethics and healthcare arose when I was appointed the first Senior Medical Reviewer for Scotland in , which is a statutory role conferred by the Certification of Death Scotland Act The reform of death certification had been a long-term aim of mine when I was the inaugural Registrar and third President of the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine. This has allowed me to provide an additional contribution to other organisational workstreams, making use of my knowledge in information governance and the 17 years of practical skills I had gained in supporting doctors in the UK, South Africa and the Republic of Ireland as a medicolegal adviser.

The areas in which the Caldicott Guardian is expected to influence include: strategy and governance; confidentiality and data protection expertise; internal information processing, and information sharing.

It is quite a responsibility to be a Caldicott Guardian, as well as being a great honour. It is facilitating the access of people to records to which they are entitled, helping avoid the release of information which is considered confidential and utilising the immense amount of data we possess within our diverse organisation to improve the health and social care of the patients of Scotland.

We have been living with COVID for over a year, and it has affected everyone world-wide in at least one way or another. For some of us, this means the loss of a loved one. Now there is finally real hope for a reduction in deaths and severe disease caused by the infection with the introduction of effective vaccines and better treatment. My own experiences of managing patients with post-COVID syndrome reflects very much the published studies of this condition.

Many of these patients are still unable to work many months after their initial acute illness. They are frustrated by poor appreciation by some medical staff of the nature of the ongoing symptoms after acute COVID, of having multiple referrals to emergency departments or individual specialists, and in a lack of effective therapy. Long COVID is when a patient continues to experience or develops new disabling symptoms for months after the initial infection.

These can involve just about any organ system of the human body. Extreme fatigue is commonly reported in addition to:.

Many patients also report that these symptoms can come and go. Such a diverse range of symptoms for Long COVID presents a real challenge to general practitioners: is this continuing infection? Because of the growing realisation that these persistent symptoms were proving quite common, it was clear there was a need for a national guideline to set out a definition of the condition, to identify the evidence base for any investigations and treatment, and to develop a framework for services that might be required.

As an infectious disease specialist, I was asked to be a member of the oversight committee, to provide a definition of the condition, and to set out the questions that the guideline needed to address. This was a real challenge — the knowledge base for Long COVID was very limited and there was no accepted definition or indeed name for the syndrome. Having a definition is incredibly important — this will allow every consultation with patients who have Post-COVID syndrome to be captured by computerised data systems so that we can build up an accurate picture of its prevalence, the spectrum of symptoms experienced and risk factors for its development.

The guideline development team worked incredibly hard and at a fast pace to gather all available evidence in order to produce a document that could be used as quickly as possible. Specialists from across the UK were involved, as well as patients who had experienced the condition.

A real challenge for developing the Long COVID guideline was the dearth of good evidence — this is such a recent illness that there was not much high quality research available. However, the final guideline incorporated all that was known at this time and sets out some concrete advice on diagnosis, investigations and management.

But it is a welcome beginning that provides a solid start in recognising and defining the condition, and providing valuable evidence-based recommendations for clinicians caring for Long COVID patients. Knowledge and the sharing of that knowledge will be crucial to improving the lives of those with the condition.

Equality is important. As a publicly funded organisation, Healthcare Improvement Scotland has legal duties to take action to address the inequalities that exist in Scotland. We must also be able evidence how we have met our duties in everything that we do. So how do we make sure it underlies our work? Associate Improvement Advisor James Battye give us his thoughts.

Given what we know about health inequalities in Scotland , keeping a constant focus on this is absolutely essential. What will I do with it now? Health inequality was a key theme of the forum. In addition, among the sixty or so breakout sessions there were a good few dedicated to improvement and inequalities. For me, two questions stand out when I think about health inequalities and quality improvement: firstly, what can health and social care systems do to support and sustain a culture of improvement and redesign around health inequality?

And secondly, how do we measure the effect improvement or redesign has had on health inequalities themselves? One theme emerged early on during presentations and this was the importance of a strong values base along staff at all levels which incorporated addressing inequality. The movement has prompted health and social care professionals to examine their practice and consider whether they were doing all they could to end the racial disparities which exist within the U.

In the examples shared during the forum, health and social care professionals said they felt empowered to take action as tackling inequality was part of their job. Sitting as part of Healthcare Improvement Scotland, the ihub is able to develop offerings which integrate and align with the evidence and assurance functions and, through strong partnership working with the Scottish Health Council, enable the voice and experience of those using services and their families to inform the design and delivery of health and social care services.

A footprint in every level of the system means we are able to ensure policy is informed by the experience of frontline delivery as well as enabling the delivery of key policy into everyday practice. Our international connections enable us to ensure our work in Scotland is informed by the wider international thinking and experience, whilst playing an important role in enabling adaptation into the Scottish context. The ihub is helping to ensure that the voice and experience of those using services and their families are able to inform the design and delivery of health and social care services.

Each institution invited hospital administrators and clinicians to hear startups pitch, and business development experts from Partners Innovation, our licensing and technical transfer office. I was excited to see such a strong presence from these cross-functional teams.

Last year, our PULSE strategy was simple — bring a focused topic or challenge area to reverse pitches, and meet the companies who addressed our needs. After observing the power of the PULSE network, seeing relationships formed between ourselves and other champions, and also being exposed to other startups unrelated to our original focus these conversations led to one contract and two matches in the PULSE cohort , we knew we wanted to focus on relationships this year.

This process laid the foundation for matchmaking because it helped inform which startups with potential solutions should apply to PULSE , increasing the likelihood of successful matches down the road.