Everyone, including patients, doctors, nurses and other health professionals and app developers, is invited to submit new ideas of health apps and online maps they think would be useful.

For the next six weeks, people can visit maps and apps and suggest favourite apps, ideas for apps or health maps they would like to see, as well as vote for their favourite ideas submitted by others.

In the video below Dr Shaibal Roy explains more about apps and how you can get involved.

The call for ideas, suggestions and votes for apps or health maps come under one of these five themes:

• Personalisation and choice of care and support: for example, an app that allows a user to search for health information online
• Better health and care outcomes: for example, an app that allows a patient to manage their health condition
• Autonomy and accountability: for example, an app that allows patients to publicly rate and review their local health services
• Improving public health: for example, an app that tracks an individual’s levels of exercise
• Improving long-term care and support: for example, an app that helps with planning long-term care and support

Examples of existing apps that benefits patients include:

• Choosing Well app from NHS Yorkshire and Humber, gives addresses of the nearest NHS services
• Paediatric Emergency Drugs app developed by Evelina Children’s Hospital helps calculate correct medicine dosage;
• iBreastCheck, Breakthrough Breast Cancer – gives information about checking breasts for abnormalities;
• MicroGuide, NHS Southampton – gives practical support to clinicians when treating patients with infections;

This radical shake up of the NHS will impact on many Surepoint clients. To help us make sense of this we have tried to capture the new landscape in the mindmap below. There’s an expadable / collapsible version in the Mindjet Player window and a fully expanded version in the Scribd window.

• Download White Paper: Equity and excellence liberating the NHS (PDF, 720K)
• Download analytical strategy for the White Paper and associated documents (PDF, 117K)
• Download initial equality impact assessment (PDF, 150K)
• Secretary of State’s statement to the House of Commons, 12 July 2010
• Press release, 12 July 2010

New ‘Online Engagement Guidelines’, published by the MOD today, make clear that Forces and MOD personnel can make full use of websites such as Facebook and YouTube as long as they follow the same high standards of conduct and behaviour online as would be expected elsewhere.

In an interesting development staff are being encouraged talk about their work online without prior authorisation from their chain of command, as long as they stay within the advice. Whether this will continue remains to be seen but for now this development should be welcomed.

• MOD online engagement guidelines
• Factsheet: UK defence and the armed forces on the web
• Defence news blog
• Defence headquarters on YouTube

The project will encourage local authorities to work with other public, private and third sector service providers to develop their capacity and commitment to engaging with young people through social networking.

The Action Learning Set is aimed at anyone interested in enabling local authorities to work with social networking sites and young people in order to encourage young people’s engagement in civic society, including: youth workers, policy officers and councillors.

Download full details and a joining form from the LGiU’s Children’s Services Network website.

The masterclass offered a well balanced mixture of presentations, discussion and debate. Bruce, chief architect behind the Faculty masterclasses, invited me to write up the emerging issues highlighted during the discussion at the masterclass into a report. I suggested that the report production could be done collaboratively using one of the many freely available wiki tools on the web. Bruce was soon sold on the idea and with help from colleague and agent provocateur Helen Nichol, the NHS social networking wiki emerged on Wetpaint.

Within a few days most of the masterclass participants were using the wiki to read about and contribute ideas building on the issues emerging out of the workshop. After a few weeks Rowan extracted the collective input and used it to produce the faculty briefing paper “The power and perils of using social networking tools in the NHS.” The briefing paper provide some practical hints and tips for anyone in health and social care who is using or considering using social networking tools. It’s not just the quality of the collectively assemebled content that makes the briefing paper worthy of a read but the fact that it was created using one of the very tools the paper is talking about. Talk about walking the talk!

Peruse the final product

Faculty background

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics is a UK wide Community of Practice for anyone working in the NHS, Social Care, Higher Education and the Private Sector who is passionate about using Informatics to improve health and social care. To apply for membership go to www.espace.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/community/nhs-faculty-HI/. You will be prompted to enter your eSpace log-in details or to apply for
membership when you click on this link.

The research team will be running a number of workshops and on-line events to encourage contributions and opinions from individuals and groups with experience in this field or similar fields in other industry sectors.

More details can be found at www.hoip.eu/web2health or by emailing web2health@hoip.eu for a summary of the research brief. A brief introductory presentation can be viewed at www.hoip.eu/web2health/briefing.

Our friends at the NHS Faculty of Health Informatics have established good connections with the researchers and promised to keep us informed with developments.

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics masterclass entitled: “The powers and the perils of using Social Networking tools in the NHS” was held on 15th May 2008 at the British Library in London.

The wiki can be accessed at http://nhssocialnetworking.wetpaint.com and is open to anyone who has something to contribute about this interesting area.

Having co-facilitated the original masterclass, Rowan Purdy, senior consultant at Surepoint, has been commissioned to edit the final discussion paper. We will publish it here soon.

Organisations representing the views of 100,000 people were involved in the development of the Independence, community. A subsequent listening exercise called Your Health, Your Care, Your Say then sought the healthcare views of over 40,000 members of the public. This was done through an online survey and face-to-face regional debates with randomly selected participants.

The main outcome from two “listening exercises” was an overwhelming endorsement from those who took part for more choice, high-quality support and services personalised around their needs. When they access community services people said they wanted to do so in places and at times that fit in with the way they lead their lives. And they expect to see support for those in greatest need and care on offer closer to home, with services shifted from hospitals into local communities. These views are clearly represented in the recommendations in the white paper.

The willingness to engage with and listen to others and provide real opportunities for people to have their say was crucial in defining the white paper. Many believe that they will also be important as we work together to translate the policy into practice. The key words here are work together. For me the white paper could and should have placed more emphasis on working together.

But why should we work together? The hypothesis is simple but powerful, collaboration is more effective than working alone. Collaboration helps us to:

• develop a better sense of belonging and ownership
• understand one another and value our diversity
• improve outcomes that would not otherwise be attained
• improve performance and increase productivity
• enhance capacity

Collaboration delivers collaborative advantage. That is something is achieved that could not have been achieved without the collaboration. Sounds straightforward enough. So how do we begin to collaborate successfully? Successful collaboration requires:

• trust – critical to motivation
• all partners need to want to try
• committment – it takes effort
• implementation requires work on mind sets, processes, structures, and skills
• manage expectations
• talking is good – just do it – communicate, communicate, communicate

But what about the barriers that might prevent us from working together. Put simply, they include:

• mistrust
• differences in status and culture
• technical complexity
• dynamics within and between groups

So how do we avoid these pitfalls. There are a plethora of techniques which can be used to facilitate successful collaboration. By far the most important is building trust. Trust is the basis for active participation and effective collaboration. Without trust people are unwilling to participate and cooperate with one another.

However, building trust is not a linear progression to a magic place. Building trust is cyclical and involves iterative development. To build and reinforce trust it is important to:

• recognise that everyone has something to learn and everone has something to share
• have enough trust and take a risk to initiate the collaboration
• form expectations based on reputation, track record, agreements
• set common and realistic objectives, start with something small and build on it
• have and share common experiences
• deliver and celebrate achievements however small as this can form the motivational basis for more ambitious collaboration

So how do you know when sufficient trust has been established so that collaboration can begin. From my experience you don’t. Sometimes it’s best to get started on some action without fully developing trust.

The challenge for organisations such as the CSIP, responsible for supporting local communities to implement the recommendations of the white paper, will be to motivate, mobilise and broker some action leading to improvements. We will achieve this by:

• championing collaborative working
• recognising the role of trust in successful collaboration
• embracing diversity, complexity and conflict
• empowering people to have a voice
• encouraging inclusion and active participation

Finally, and in the spirit of the view that everyone has something to learn and everone has something to share, I think that we should take a step back and look to see if we can learn from elsewhere.

The European Social Research Council and the Nuffield Trust recently funded a research-based seminar series seeks to address some of these issues around the role of trust in public sector service organisation and delivery. For more information visit the JISC mail listing, entitled ‘trust’ http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/trust.html> or see this accessible paper, ‘Trust in the Public Sector’, by Professor Huw Davies and Dr Mark Dibden at the Centre for public policy and Management at the University of St Andrews.

Leading UK social software developers, Headshift, have sparked debate on the role of social technology in implementing the vision of Our Health, Our Care, Our Say? Read the fascinating article by Lee and Stuart here http://www.headshift.com/archives/002780.cfm>. Patient Opinion www.patientopinion.org.uk> is one small example of this new thinking – a website where patients can share their experiences and rate hospitals and services – and is very much in line with the white paper’s call for everyone to have the opportunity to share their views and experiences. It uses social software tools and techniques such as patient weblogs, location-based services, RSS and social tagging to create reliable patient-generated reputation information for individual departments and services, and the site shares these with prospective patients at the point when they are choosing a hospital.

Within CSIP we are actively using social software to support our work. The award winning knowledge community http://kc.csip.org.uk> is a great example. The kc is a shared space where people can exchange knowledge, information and experiences relating to any aspect of health and social care in order to contribute to the improvement of care services and the well-being of vulnerable people. It connects a wide range of people, groups, organisations and information in a way that is designed to make it easy for people to find who or what they are looking for, taking into account a variety of different perspectives and points of view.

As a personal advocate for the collaborative power of social software I wonder how long it will be before we see policy authored collaboratively using a wiki. For more information see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki.

Interesting items on the white paper

• Carers UK http://www.carersuk.org/Newsandcampaigns/Newsreleases/1138702234>
• Healthcare Commission response http://www.healthcarecommission.org.uk/NewsAndEvents/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetail/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=4022709&chk=s3U9T8>
• Royal College of Physicians/Royal College of General Practitioners http://www.rcgp.org.uk/press/2006/0008.asp>
• Sainsbury centre for mental health responsehttp://www.scmh.org.uk/80256FBD004F6342/vWeb/pcKHAL6LMDHG>
• Kings Fund response http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/news/press_releases/government_plans.html>
• British Medical Association response http://www.bma.org.uk/pressrel.nsf/wlu/SGOY-6LJJSN?OpenDocument&vw=wfmms>
• Royal College of Nursing http://www.rcn.org.uk/news/display.php?ID=1860>
• Headshift response http://www.headshift.com/archives/002780.cfm>
• Transcript of the white paper webchat with No. 10 Downing Street http://www.csip.org.uk/whitepaper_webchat_transcript.html
  ]]> http://www.surepoint.co.uk/blog/2006/02/in-collaboration-we-trust-2/feed/ 0 http://www.surepoint.co.uk/blog/2006/01/have-your-say-on-the-white-paper-in-a-webchat-with-no-10-downing-street/ http://www.surepoint.co.uk/blog/2006/01/have-your-say-on-the-white-paper-in-a-webchat-with-no-10-downing-street/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:30:22 +0000 Rowan Purdy http://surepoint.co.uk/blog/?p=11 http://www.surepoint.co.uk/blog/2006/01/have-your-say-on-the-white-paper-in-a-webchat-with-no-10-downing-street/feed/ 0