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SYSTEMS

priority. It is important to replace and not reading this thinking ,“That’s not us, 2. George Boak, (2011) MA,
simply improve things with low human we’re all sorted”. What I would say is ‘Leading innovaton and Change’,
value because human value has to be the think again, have a detailed look, Course materials, York St John University.
startng point in human services, and is and talk to your support staf. As it is
rarely served well by tweaks or reforms to with remote controls, black socks, If you are interested in fnding out
existng systems. cables and junk so it is with the more about Project 17: Human Value
paraphernalia of systems and processes in Systems, please contact Jo Clare at
Take our (newly named) Health Acton in social care: things hide, disappear and jo.clare@threecs.co.uk
and Emergency system as a prime reappear, things muddle and multply.
example. In good faith lots of alleged Systems are never parked where you
improvements had been made to last lef them. In your absence,
elements of this previously your cables have become knoted and
sprawling system over many years, your carefully designed mole hills have
some generated by atenton to turned into mountains.
compliance, some generated by
commissioner-specifc requirements,
some generated by the tyranny of 1. Care Quality Commission –
unbridled good ideas. The result? A dog’s Regulaton 17 Good Governance
dinner of documents with the full human htp://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-
value to a person’s daily health too ofen providers/regulatons-enforcement/
obscured by volume, duplicaton, regulaton-17-good-governance
deviaton and poor navigaton.

We spent six months in a highly involved
and iteratve process guided by principles
of ‘leading innovaton and change’ (2)
followed by a six month pilot to turn
a 19 document non-standardised system
into a simple four document one.
The end product has extnguished a high
risk associated with replicaton of health
data, ie. failing to update in all places.
When we roll it out, it will also do away
with other emergency documents,
like grab and run sheets, and missing
persons. Staf previously labelled ‘stuck
and resistant to change’ have embraced
it wholeheartedly. Staf describe the main
document as friendly, which for a
system document is a real coup.
Champing at the bit, some managers
have pre-empted the end of the pilot and
rolled out the changes in their services
without authorisaton. Although it is early
days, managers’ feedback is that it will
fulfl its promise to reduce waste and
release tme for support. In all my years
involvement in innovaton and change
I cannot remember being involved in a
change so ordinary yet unexpectedly and
emphatcally popular.

The next big amber project is our person-
centred planning and decision-making
systems. Perhaps excited by our Project 17
gains, what started out as improvement is
now a radical departure which, we hope,
will make the person-centred approach a
deeper part of Three Cs’ DNA.

Maybe you are a senior manager, have an
ISO 9001 badge and/or a CEO who wears
an ‘I love systems’ T-shirt and you are

www.cl-initatves.co.uk Community Living Vol 31 No 2 | Winter 2017 21