New blog post from Colin Stuckey, CT Lead Radiographer at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust

Colin Stuckey is CT Lead Radiographer at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust and talks about using the SCORE survey in his department.
“I was introduced to the South West Academic Health Science Network (SW AHSN) by Julie Mills at Exeter University around October 2015.  I had only just started as CT lead at the hospital and thought it would be good way to get a picture of where the department was right from the very start. I started to find out more about the SCORE survey and we got it up and running, after a fair amount of persuasion and education we got a really good response rate from some groups and mixed response from others. We ran this over quite a large group in CT, and at the same time, my colleague Christine also ran the survey with the radiographers in MRI.  We arranged the surveys so we were able to get the results at the same time.
 
One of the challenges of the survey was to ensure that as many people as possible understood what we were doing – and we found it quite challenging to get people involved despite good communications. There had been a national staff survey that had been run shortly before and people had spent some time completing this. This made some people sceptical as they were worried that they would spend their time completing a survey which would not be acted upon in the future. Despite this, we managed to get a 50% hit rate, which I was really pleased with, although the portering group struggled as they did not use IT as frequently as rest of group.
 
Once we had got the results through, Christine and I attended the fantastic SW AHSN debrief training at Exeter Racecourse, which was so helpful and really opened our eyes to the process. It would definitely have been helpful to attend the debrief training before we embarked on the process as it gave us a much clearer picture of the whole process.  In retrospect we both felt that it would have been beneficial to have run the survey across the whole department,  rather than two small parts of the department, as the nurses who attended the debrief felt left out and they would have liked to have been part of it so they could have their concerns heard. However, we learned some really useful lessons from the day which was great.
After the debrief, we had to explain to our managers all about the SCORE Survey, and –  once we had got results – they were interested in what was going on. Julie came back and carried out the debrief for the CT team and Matt Hill, of the SW AHSN, and I debriefed for the MRI radiographers. We had managed to garner lots of really interesting information from the groups we debriefed and they have made loads of positive suggestions for change for quality improvement.
 
Time was a factor however and it has been tricky freeing up people do to the debrief in order to really dig down into the details.
The upshot is that, via the survey, the team have come up with some really great ideas of ways to support me in my role. It was also really useful to show to my manager what the team were feeling– a lot of it was wanting better communication with the senior management teams, which is so easy to achieve with no added cost to the department.”
If you are interested in improving and developing safety culture within your organisation please feel free to contact our Improvement Lead joanna.pendray@swahsn.com, for further information.