I would like to acknowledge the Florence Nightingale Foundation Trustees and most generous sponsors. In addition, special thanks to the CEO and her extremely hard working support team, without which the following would not have been possible.
I would also like to thank The Burdett Trust for Nursing for the sponsorship of the scholarship.
Particular acknowledgements to my mentor and supporter Sir Stephen Moss and my own Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, for standing by me throughout and supporting and trusting the ideas and initiatives I wanted to explore.
During the past eighteen months, I have been on the most incredible career and life journey. I would never have expected to have seen so much, learned so much and met so many incredible people. I have been privileged to be a part of and touch so many people’s lives.
I have emerged much the better person, Nurse and leader and as a result of the Scholarship. I am in a much stronger position to influence my career, my profession and the world my patients live in.
The journey began with one of the most comprehensive assessments of me as a person, leader, Manager, Nurse and scholar. This extensive assessment, facilitated by Sue Machel, used up to ten different tools and approaches to build up an accurate picture of my strengths and weaknesses and areas of development. There is no doubt that this was critical in selecting the leadership courses and experiences that I undertook throughout my scholarship, as well as being matched with a mentor who would be able to challenge and support me.
The core modules offered a range of foundation learning and experience that I had never been able to access previously. This included working with academic and executive staff from Stanford University, RADA, NHS Leadership, Trust Development Authority, The King’s Fund, MP’s and Members of the House of Lords.
I utilised the lessons learned from each of these modules and experiences in my working and personal life on a daily basis and this has led to completing further work with some of the institutions for both myself and my teams.
I attended the prestigious and world acknowledged “Women in Power” Post Graduate Executive Programme at Harvard University in Boston as well as three modules focusing on patient safety and executive leadership with the Institute of Healthcare Improvement also based in Boston.
Through study tours, I visited Magnet Hospitals and world leading healthcare providers in the USA, Holland and the UK. This included, Virginia Mason, the Mayo Clinic and Massachusetts General.
I also attended a very special course on ‘How Disney Would Run Health Care’ based in the USA and the UK. This was a once in a life time opportunity to work with this organisation, who know how to delight their users and retain excellent staff and user experience.
Finally, I learned some of the lessons on human factors and highly reliable safety organisations from the US Navy.
During this time, my career continued to develop and grow and has lead me to where I am now as Chief Nurse/Chief Operating Officer at Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and a visiting Professor at Birmingham City University.
During my Scholarship, I have lectured nationally every month to audiences on leadership, personal development and women’s issues using my learning from the scholarship. I have been asked to judge HSJ National Safety Awards, National Students Awards and coached and mentored a number of existing and aspiring executive leaders. In addition, I now represent Directors of Nursing in the West Midlands on the Health Education Leadership Board and was a finalist in the Health Education Leader of the Year in 2014.
My work with charities has also developed as a result of my scholarship and I now hold posts as a Nurse Trustee for a national charity, a Regional Nurse for a second national charity, a Trustee for a local Hospice and President of my local branch of an international Women’s Charity.
The patient experience work I have led has also transformed by turning the complaints and feedback mechanism we used upside down, having patient advocates and support services “roam” our clinical areas and seek out patients who we can assist and support, rather than wait for them to come and “complain” to us. We have halved the formal complaints we receive in the Trust and improved our patients’ experience beyond recognition by involving them in the resolution process early on and continuously even through to designing new services and our new hospital through our co-design work. We now have a library of patient stories and journeys on our website for all to see before they come into our hospital or services and we have also been developing our feedback app to enables real time feedback and video feedback from and to patients.
The Trust has received national recognition for this work and we have been finalists in the National Patient Experience Awards and are now finalists in the HSJ Award for 2015.
The Trust has been so impressed with the work completed during the Scholarship, we have been able to support a scholar for the 15/16 year period and have used the assessment model on all our Senior Nurses and Midwives. There is now a queue of people wanting to take up this superb opportunity to make a difference in their lives and those whom they are privileged to serve as Nurses and Midwives.