Flip The Triangle – winners of ‘Quality Improvement and/or Service Transformation’ award at the National Positive Practice in mental Health Awards 2019

Shoreditch Ward, a Specialist Medium Secure Forensic Learning Disability ward based at The John Howard Centre won the Positive Practise in Mental Health ‘Quality Improvement and/or Service Transformation’ category for their Quality Improvement (QI) project ‘Flip the Triangle’.

Flip the Triangle award winning team

Flip The Triangle refers to changing the culture on Shoreditch ward to increase focus on positive and proactive interventions. As a forensic service, we are very good at thinking about our service-users and managing risk when they are in ‘crisis’. However crisis interventions are usually the most high risk for Shoreditch Ward’s staff and patients and often involve physical and restrictive interventions. Focusing on crisis situations can also mean patients displaying ‘settled’ and ‘baseline’ behaviours can sometimes be overlooked and ‘forgotten’.

This project is about changing the culture on Shoreditch ward to ‘flip’ the whole team’s thinking into re-focusing their care and interventions to proactively keep patients at ‘baseline’ in order to prevent escalation, reduce use of physical and restrictive interventions and make sure no patient is ‘forgotten’. The project’s aim is to increase and maintain our proactive and positive interventions to a rate of 95% by January 2020.

Dr Charlotte Whittle, Clinical Psychologist and Project Lead had this to say about the team’s award winning project –

“The QI team was honoured to be shortlisted for the award and to win was truly fantastic. The team has worked tirelessly to improve the care for patients and has supported each other in difficult circumstances and we are very proud to be recognised for our work. We had 17 members of our team attend the Award ceremony and it was great to be able to celebrate together.

Receiving the Award felt like a momentous milestone in our QI journey, but we recognise the hard work doesn’t stop here! The project has highlighted how important family and carer involvement is in the lives of our service-users and the next steps for the project aim to increase family and carer engagement through ‘family meals’ to support positive communication and interaction.

We have also been filming a documentary about staff and service-user experiences of the project and we plan to premier the film at the end of the year. We are excited to keep flipping the triangle!”

Keep up with this team’s hard work on Twitter @FlipTriangle