Improving the experience of New Starters trust-wide

 12th April 2022

Written and contributed to by project team members: Lenna Adley (Project Lead), Katherine Brittin, Tanya Carter, Tina Collins, Alison Naughton, Dave Pearson, Kashif Ghafoor, Bernard Wooster, Martin Greig, Sheila O’Connell, Sonia Kaur, Isabella Larkin, Joseph Duncan & Angharad Ruttley.

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Staff starting at ELFT have sometimes felt that they aren’t receiving all they need to do their job properly when they start, which can lead to frustration for both the staff member and their new area of work.

Some new staff have reported “that they feel undervalued” when what they need is not in place with one saying it made them feel as they were “not expected and an inconvenience” This gives a poor first impression to staff and can potentially affect retention of new staff the Trust has worked hard to attract.

Although the issue may seem appear simple to solve, it is a complex issue that requires cross system collaboration. A team from all the departments responsible came together to try to test some ideas to help improve the experience of new staff starting at ELFT.

The team is led by Lenna Adley an ELFT service user who was recently appointed as a staff member so had recent lived experience. Lenna said the project was important to her because she wanted to make it better for other people entering the trust. Team members included representation from people and culture, registration authority, digital and the IT helpdesk.

The team set an aim to firstly look work towards ensuring all staff members were in possession of their ‘smartcard’, IT equipment and had access to all clinical systems within five days of starting at ELFT.  Team members came together to map out a few processes of a new starter journey and used a flow chart (figure 1) to document the process.

The team brainstormed some ideas that they could test and used a driver diagram (figure 2) to visualise their change theory including their aim.

In the first instance the team worked on ensuring staff have connection to IT and clinical systems within 5 days which has been achieved (figure 3). The next area of focus is to improve smartcard access and ensuring IT staff have all the IT equipment they need within 5 days.