Multi-disciplinary clinical innovations database @ RBHT

A database of a collection of healthcare innovations by RBHT’s multi-disciplinary clinicians, sharing the results of innovative projects and research to provide information to healthcare professionals across the Trust who are seeking to implement new policies, products or practices, or to build on the ideas of others to improve the quality of their work and patient care.

During which period did you implement your innovation?

18 August 2016

What was the driver for your innovation?

A knowledge management initiative to enable knowledge sharing to drive innovation at Trust level.  As a result of attending meetings with the medical education committee and the medical education board at my Trust, as well as through assisting with literature searches, I realised that clinicians were creating many innovative clinical practices and that knowledge of these innovative practices was hidden in departmental silos, USB sticks, paper based posters and presentations.  These was no means of easily being able to share this knowledge in a way that would be beneficial to clinicians in my Trust as a way of learning from others’ experiences in working towards improving patient care.

What did you do?

My aim was to make in-house innovative multi-disciplinary clinical knowledge and clinical practice more discoverable and shareable as well as providing a platform for celebrating achievement of clinicians in making improvements to patient care and thereby providing inspiration for others to either innovate themselves or enable quick adoption of innovations already implemented.

My objective was to achieve this via a database hosted in-house within the Trust.  We are a two hospital site 20 miles apart and this has succeeded in bringing together multi-disciplinary clinicians engaged in innovation towards improving the quality of patient care and sharing their work with each other and an opportunity for busy clinicians to get to know each other through their body of work.  We the Trust’s LKS service, maintain and update the database with content provided to us by multi-disciplinary clinicians.  The creation of the database structure was possible using existing functionality within the Trust’s intranet infrastructure and initial support from the IT web admin team, therefore there were no implementation costs involved.  The database went ‘live’ on 18 August 2016.

What methods were used to evaluate your innovation?

The LKS innovation was evaluated via a framework provided by improvement science for research focused on healthcare improvement.  This is a new and evolving field which looks at which improvement strategies works best in the complex adaptive system of the acute care organization in different ways.  The database showcases which improvements work as clinicians endeavour to assure effective and safe patient care – with the highlight on how what we know informs what we do, in translating knowledge into practice. To date these include;

  • An awareness of clinical practices in AICU on one site inspiring these to be explored and adapted for use in PICU on the other site.
  • Maintaining an institutional memory of a ground-breaking clinical innovation from this Trust showcased at ESC 2016 conference in Rome.
  • Enabling the networking and creation of a project committee comprising of clinicians cross-site who were otherwise unaware that their innovative work was complementing that of the other in working towards quality improvement in patient care.
  • Continuity with projects carried out by junior doctors on rotation – the database ensures that continuity is not broken with each rotation through maintaining institutional memory of projects.
  • Showcasing the Compassionate Care initiatives undertaken annually by the nursing directorate.
  • Showcasing the patient experience improvement projects undertaken by allied health professionals.
  • Recording of all Quality Improvement projects undertaken by multi-disciplinary clinicians in the Trust. Projects completed being used to inspire future projects.
  • Showcasing the patient care innovation projects of clinicians for CQC inspections and non-executive directors on the Trust Board.

What were the outcomes and key learning points?

The creation and population of the clinical innovations database happened quite quickly once I started on that journey. This was because of the initial engagement work we carried out in previous years among multi-disciplinary clinicians cross-site as part of efforts to raise the profile of the library service, the support of our medical education director, the IT team and the director of strategy as well as all the multi-disciplinary clinicians who came together with a willingness to showcase and share their work and the Trust’s Communications team who assisted with high profile cross-site publicity once the database was launched. I look upon the innovations database as a project that was co-created by all these players coming together and generating a willingness to make change happen, thereby being able to claim ownership in that which was created as a result.  The library service is perceived as common ground for all the multi-disciplinary professions here and therefore seen as the natural guardians of this knowledge base. 

Further Information 

Find out more about this project. This innovations database was also showcased at the Knowledge for Health - Knowledge Management Study Day – 11 November 2016 – York and a mention in an article in CILIP Update of Feb 2017 – “NHS Knowledge Management for Healthcare: Knowledge Management ToolKit” by Emily Hopkins.

Submitted by Samantha Unamboowe, Library Manager, Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust