Our Innovation Hub project is about developing the right environment for occupational therapists to share and learn from others about what they are improving. As part of the pilot, we’re asking you to submit an improvement journey to help us capture the service challenges the OT profession is trying to improve.
Most of us at some point have thought about an aspect of our work that could be improved. Occupational therapists, learners, support workers and managers of occupational therapy services are innovating or involved in improvement activities if they are working with others to make changes that will lead to better health outcomes, better system performance and better professional development.
Why is it called an improvement journey?
Making improvements to working practices is a journey and always involves collaborating and learning with others to solve service challenges. Viewing improvement as a journey encourages us to think about breaking down the process of change into smaller manageable activities, such as:
- defining the problem and underlying causes
- stakeholder mapping
- networking
- identifying funding
- building a business case.
At what point in my journey should I submit my service challenge and/or idea?
If you recognise that a change needs to be made and have ideas on how to solve a problem, we want to hear from you. We’re keen to find out what members are learning at different points in their projects and the more insight we have into the service challenges and ideas you are exploring, the better we’ll understand the areas to focus on after the pilot.
What will you do with my improvement journey?
We’ll analyse your information with others and share the learning from a range of similar projects.
We can work with you to produce an Innovation Hub case study and/or pre-recorded webinar if you’ve done considerable work to improve an area of practice and our team identifies this as an area of service improvement that Innovation Hub followers are interested in.
What’s the longer-term vision for the Innovation Hub?
What are the benefits to my practice?
As part of the pilot, we’ll be collaborating with members to better define the benefits of sharing services improvement information with us. We hope that some of the benefits will be:
- access to the learning from multiple service improvement activities of a similar type
- raising the profile of your service through sharing your published case study on the innovation hub with your networks and organisation
- networking with members interested in improving in similar areas through our planned innovation webinar series and cafes.
What about the benefits to my organisation?
Organisations can also raise the profile of their occupational therapy services by sharing your published case study. They too will benefit from access to the other Innovation Hub case studies and data. As the project develops, we will be looking to collaborate with health and social care decision-makers to establish ways the Innovation Hub can support them to better use the expertise of occupational therapists within their wider transformation projects.
Submit your improvement journey and find out more about the pilot phase of our Innovation Hub.
Contact us if you have any questions or to share your ideas on the pilot.