PDSA of the month!
PDSA of the month: Using post-its notes to support service users to participate more in community meeting discussions on Gardner Ward
By Linnea Landin, Social Therapist, Gardner Ward
The Gold Standards project team on Gardner Ward in City and Hackney is working to improve service users’ experience of the environment. Our project team, which includes a former service user and a peer support worker, along with members of the ward team and Stephen Sandford, Head of Arts Therapies, has identified a range of factors, which we believe are contributing to people feeling less satisfied than we want them to feel on Gardner ward.
Our data has indicated that lack of things to keep people meaningfully occupied is one of the areas of greatest dissatisfaction for our service users, so we have prioritised this in our PDSA tests of change.
We realised that one issue that might be hampering our progress was that, although we were discussing people’s views on activities in community meetings, we weren’t necessarily getting the thoughts and feelings of everyone on the ward. We talked this through and realised that we could try using post-its with service users during the team meeting, just like we use them within QI projects; to ensure everyone’s thoughts are captured and we don’t just hear the loudest voices.
We predicted that:
1. People would find it easier to express their views if we use post-its and that;
2. Staff would gain useful information, which would mean they can put things in place that are more likely to work and improve satisfaction in this area.
We ran this test a couple of weeks ago and found that using post-its did really help us to get a broader range of views. We learnt that we needed to try to provide more access to activities and arts therapies, and we’ve also now moved our books into the day area so people can access them more easily.
We are also now planning to test using post-its in our community meeting discussions about violence and aggression, which we have introduced as part of the City and Hackney Violence Reduction Collaborative.
We would really recommend using post-its in this way with service users and carers if you are facing similar challenges in ensuring you capture everyone’s views!
