Swedish-style training for NHS staff

HEALTH chiefs at Warrington are studying the possibility of setting up a Swedish-style training and education centre for NHS staff.
This follows a study tour to Jonkoping, Sweden by a team from NHS Warrington.
Jonkoping has acquired a reputation for quality and service improvement and the hub of the whole improvement is the Qulturum.
Everyone who works in the Jonkoping system goes through a systematic programme of training and education in the methods and tools available for improvement.
Dr Sarah Baker, chief clinical officer with Warrington Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said: “This ensures that everyone working in the health and social care system has a common language for improvement.
“It was this consistency of approach that was most marked and clearly has played a major part in their reputation and the day-to-day delivery.”
Dr Baker, in a report to Warrington Health and Wellbeing Board, said everyone in the Jonkoping system spoke of having two jobs – one, their employed day job and the other, looking ways to improve what they did in the first job.
This led to an inherent culture of continuous improvement.
They described their culture as moving from “everyone does their best, we’ll see what happens” to “this is what we want to happen, what do we do to get there?”
The Qulturum was the hub of the whole system and the proposal was to establish a Warrington Qulturum.
To do this it would be necessary to describe how such an approach might look, identify potential input providers, identify an organisation or individual to act as a programme co-ordinator, establish an “oversight” group to ratify programme content with a “user group” to test components and to identify resource requirements.
Dr Baker said there are, in Warrington, a range of NHS bodies and others offering training and development and a number of individuals and teams who had accessed various components of these developments from various providers.
The value of a consistent approach, understood by all, seen as “how we do business around here”was an integral part of the culture as demonstrated in Jonkoping.