Nurses 'must speed up productivity improvements'

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement is currently developing four or five programmes to drive up quality, innovation and productivity across the health service.

Nursing Times understands this work will incorporate its existing “productive” series – including Productive Ward, Productive Operating Theatre and Productive Community Services – and be linked to the eight high impact actions identified by the chief nursing officer Dame Christine Beasley (news, 17 November, p1).  

Lynn Callard, head of the institute’s productive programmes, said it would be focusing on trusts that had failed to adopt the productive programmes as quickly as others.

She said: “We know some organisations are really storming along [with the productive series] and have nearly covered their whole organisation – others have not. We are going to start looking at what makes the difference and how can we help those organisations not doing so well.”

The institute’s quality innovation, productivity and prevention lead Lorraine Foley said significantly accelerating the speed of adoption of the programmes was new ground for the institute. She said: “What we are talking about is managing to spread this quickly on all wards at the same time – that is a bit of an unknown.”

She said ward and team leaders should be “understanding the [financial] challenge and thinking: what can I do, how can I take control, and how can I individually make improvements in productivity and quality”.

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