Winner – ideasUK: Idea of the Year Award for the Safer Provision and Caring Excellence (SPACE) QI Programme

Published on 25 November 2019

Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM) scooped three awards at the prestigious ideasUK conference, held in Edinburgh on the 13 / 14 November, including the Idea of the Year Award for the Safer Provision and Caring Excellence (SPACE) QI Programme, which sets out to improve the care offered to elderly patients.

ideasUK, the UK’s foremost team for the promotion of employee innovation programmes, hosted its 33rd International Conference 13 / 14 November 2019 at the Dalmahoy Hotel in Edinburgh, to explore the latest and best in harnessing employee power to develop and promote innovation in the workplace.

The Idea of the Year competition saw over 70 ideas submitted in ten categories from Customer Focus through to Corporate Social Responsibility, People and Organisation and Value for Money. HIWM were delighted to accept the award for the Idea of the Year 2019, as well as the Continuous Improvement Award for SPACE programme, and runner up People & Organisation Award 2019 for Learning from Excellence; a method of learning from what goes right in healthcare using positive incident reporting supported by a structured learning process using appreciative inquiry (AI).

Tammy Holmes, Head of Innovation Exchange at HIWM said, “This is a fantastic achievement for the West Midlands and I am really pleased that our local innovators have been internationally acknowledged and rewarded for their hard work.  We are unbelievably proud to have had our innovations judged against those from across different sectors and countries and for them to have been acknowledged in this way.  On behalf of all the teams involved we are delighted and feel that these awards recognise the incredibly important part we have played in improving health and wealth in the West Midlands”

Adrian Plunkett, Consultant Paediatric Intensivist, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust remarked, “We tend to regard excellence as something to gratefully accept, rather than something to study and understand. Our preoccupation with avoiding error and harm in healthcare has resulted in the rise of rules and rigidity, which in turn has cultivated a culture of fear and stifled innovation. It’s time to redress the balance. We believe that studying excellence in healthcare can create new opportunities for learning and improving resilience and staff morale.”

Major Trevor Bowman, Chairman of the Judges commented, “The winner of Idea of the Year is selected from the category winners and is from a sector where the words used to describe it, taken together, are often used in the media to represent a poorly trained and staffed industry. The presenter dispelled these myths through the demonstration of the use of Appreciative Inquiry and by allowing us to understand that through concentrating on those things that are done well, staff morale and the service they provide to others is dramatically improved. The judges therefore agreed that this was a very worthy winner.”

For more information about each of the programmes, please visit meridian.www.healthinnovationwestmidlands.org

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