Southern DHB turning ‘Listening into Action’

Monday 2 May 2016

Southern DHB turning ‘Listening into Action’

This week, Southern DHB is sharing its draft values, and discussing how to turn these into actions, with patients, their whānau, staff and partner healthcare providers in a series of ‘Listening into Action’ sessions. These sessions are part of the ‘Southern Future – it’s up to us’ programme, an on-going organisation-wide initiative that aims to continually improve the quality of staff and patient experiences at Southern DHB.

The programme was launched in December 2015, and since then the DHB has had more than 3500 inputs (from participants of listening sessions and surveys), including more than 2,500 from members of staff, more than 600 from patients, whānau and representatives from partner healthcare providers.

“The ‘Listening into Action’ week gives us a chance to feedback to all the people who generously gave their time to let them know what we’ve heard, both positive and negative,” said Southern DHB Chief Executive, Carole Heatly.

The feedback provided over the past few months has enabled the DHB to develop draft values and behaviours, which describe expected behaviour of staff with others. They apply to everyone working at the DHB, whatever their role or level within the organisation.

“We’ll be sharing our draft values, what they actually mean, and what our improvement priorities are for both patients and our staff. These will ultimately help us influence the future of care across our district,” said Southern DHB Deputy Commissioner, Graham Crombie.

During the week there will also be an opportunity for participants to feed back on these values and behaviours, which will be finalised once all the feedback is collated.

“Priorities for improvement have also been identified from the feedback provided during the March ‘Creating our Future’ week. We’ve listened, and action plans are being developed to deliver against these priorities. We’re asking our communities and staff for feedback and whether they think we’re focusing on the right things and we’ll share these once they are developed,” commented Mr Crombie.

As well as the patient and staff feedback sessions, the DHB is running workshop sessions for staff who are leaders or future leaders to hear and discuss what people shared during ‘Creating our future’ week in March and introduce practical ways to embed, role model, manage and coach values.

“I’m delighted how the ‘Southern Future – it’s up to us’ programme is taking shape. This is just the beginning of an ongoing process and we’ll be continuing to engage regularly throughout our district to keep our communities informed of what is happening,” said Ms Heatly.

ENDS

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