What’s happening with the Ideal Ward Round?

Involvement is where people can get involved in a variety of activities and opportunities to provide input into services. This can sometimes lead to improvements. Involvement volunteers are supported by The Involvement, Experience & Volunteering Team to work on their own personal development in a welcoming environment. 

The Ideal Ward Round project is just one example of how we work together in partnership with our services. In this blog Jonathan Wright gives us an update on one of our Involvement projects that has changed how ward rounds are made.

It’s been a while since there has been an update about this project. We started back in 2015 with a simple idea; improve the ward round experience for everybody. From this small seed a colossal amount of work has been produced.

We first started the project by finding out what people thought of ward rounds; so questionnaires were designed, then off we went and asked people. We received about a 100 returns from carers, staff, inpatients and service users who had been discharged from inpatient units. We looked at the data, made sense of it, ran focus groups and analysed the data. We matched this with the initial questionnaire data, drew conclusions and produced 12 recommendations for running an Ideal Ward Round. Oh, and all of this was co-produced together!

Not to be put off by the size of our task we asked three inpatient wards in the Trust if they would work with us to implement the 12 recommendations. More evaluation and more questionnaires followed.

It proved to be a challenge when working with the wards. Busy wards have high demands on their time and priorities to meet every day. Trying to change how you might think about doing something different can easily slip down the list. We were always greeted with warmth and enthusiasm, but it was difficult to get any firm grip on the way we might embed a real change into everyday practice so we continued to work with the wards for the next eight months.

Finally we realised that we couldn’t do this alone. Our powers of persuasion had got us a long way but we might not make it over the final fence! Towards the end of 2017, members of the Ideal Ward Round group met with management staff in Adult Mental Health Services to see what could be done. We agreed together that we would put the 12 recommendations into a policy on ward rounds. This could then be the yardstick to measure how all ward rounds are delivered. A great result for everyone involved.

The policy will go live in 2018, after consultation with the Ideal Ward Round group and staff. From that point it asks a question of how well are we doing against the policy, but I guess that will be the next blog!

Jonathan Wright – Involvement & Experience Lead  Local Partnerships  Involvement, Experience & Volunteering Team