Training Blog

Morale is one of the most significant factors affecting organisational performance with clear links to many adverse situations:

• High sickness & absence
• High staff turnover
• Poor performance
• Poor clinical outcome
• Low customer satisfaction ratings
• Reduced team effectiveness
• Conflict & obstruction
• Increased tribunals & grievances

Medicology MTI has been developed to address two specific needs:

a robust and sensitive measure of morale
a differential diagnosis of the factors positively or negatively influencing it

It consists of a series of questions around known influencing factors and takes the average person around 10 minutes to complete.

Robust Measure

Medicology MTI introduces two important processes to ensure that the morale measurement returned is both sensitive and representative.

Firstly, it utilises variance to assess morale, i.e. how far above of below neutral the score for a particular factor is for that person and thus avoids the weakness found in many systems that use an arbitrary scale.

Secondly, it asks the respondent to indicate how important a factor is and this is taken into account in the overall calculation. Coupled with variance, this creates an immensely sensitive measure.

Differential Diagnosis

Medicology MTI is designed to provide detailed analysis, reporting and guidance. Your morale report will include analysis by:

• overall score
• individual questions
• different staffing groups or departments

Furthermore, individual questions contribute to section morale scores, to help you identify problems in the following areas:

• Growth & Development
• Leadership & Management
• Personal Factors
• Relationships
• Work (the work itself)
• Workplace (the work environment)

This level of analysis and reporting allows you to not only assess morale in different staff groups but to diagnose any specific problem areas so that interventions may be applied.

Practical Information

Medicology MTI is designed to make your life easy:

• Run morale testing from a few to thousands swiftly and effortlessly
• Define which staff groups are most appropriate to you
• Re-run the survey at intervals (which can be set up automatically e.g. 3 monthly intervals) to assess how it is changing over time
• Bulk upload your staff from Microsoft Excel® or provide them to us and we’ll do it

For more information or to try out this great product for yourself see medicology mti

medicalperception.com from Medicology Ltd allows Trusts, PCTs, SHAs, Government, Pharmaceutical, Medical Equipment & Biotech companies, health service suppliers and more to access, survey and evaluate the mindset of health service staff, simply and cost-effectively. Medicology Ltd is also the leading provider of leadership, management and personal development for health service professionals, especially clinicians, meaning we spend most of our lives inside the heads of clinical staff, understanding how they think, how they evaluate problems, their similarities and differences from each other, their sources of meaning and more. That’s a very, very good place to be when designing meaningful, high quality research.

What can we do?

• Survey health professionals in every medical specialty
• Access the medical mind nationally and internationally
• Evaluate clinical perceptions around drug therapies
• Gauge perceptions and feelings about important issues
• Develop insight into clinical pathways
• Understand how professionals choose products & services
• Develop greater sales force effectiveness
• Evaluate job satisfaction & morale
• Run a series of evaluations over time

This is just a brief set of suggestions, so if you need something not on the list then simply ask.

Why medicalperception.com?

There are very compelling reasons to use medicalperception.com

• Highly cost-effective for the highest quality research
• Rapid deployment time
• Professional outward appearance
• Ability to retain and re-run research studies, gaining insight into trends over time
• Build in the ability to control for different psychologies
• Highly trusted, competent team
• Enormous degree of medical insight available in study design

In an attempt to transform services and improve value for money a lot of healthcare organisations have turned to Lean as the basis of their improvement efforts. It is not a new concept in fact its origins can be traced back to the 15th Century when the Venetian Navy introduced a ‘flow line’ for the production of war ships. Most people though would trace its history from its implementation within Toyota where is acquired the name of the ‘Toyota Production System’ and this became ‘Lean’ in the book ‘Lean Thinking’ that was published in 1996.

However, whilst the history of Lean in manufacturing is well established, it has only been over the last five or so years that Lean has found its way into the healthcare sector. The initial focus of Lean in healthcare was very ‘point’ focused, such as fixing low level problems in a pathology lab or dealing with theatre capacity. When organisations realised that such a low level approach was unlikely to lead to changes that lasted, the focus changed to ‘end to end’ clinical pathways, but in the early days this meant from the start point till the end point for a patient within a single organisation.
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As Lean has matured, more people have started to experiment with pan-health economy Lean and this is where Lean moves from being a tactical tool to a strategic approach. It is still early days for the larger projects but there are already signs of success that significantly outweigh the many problems any form of transformation activity within the healthcare sector will experience.

In particular, because Lean consultants generally use a lot of jargon and even today use a lot of manufacturing related examples, it can be very off-putting for front-line healthcare staff. Even more damaging though is when Lean is used as a punishment because a team are under-performing or where the leadership team have hidden motives.

Lean can also experience problems after implementation if the focus is not on turning the changes in the process that have been achieved (such as new referral process) into a change in behaviour (which is achieved when people no longer realise that the process is ‘new’). With a lot of the early adopters of Lean focusing on the exciting parts of Lean, such as ‘Rapid Improvement Events’, the aspects of successful programmes that really make the difference have been forgotten, such as making sure that the Lean programme aligns with the organisational objectives, engaging frontline staff and dealing with any problems that arise along the way through some form of ‘Continuous Improvement’ process.

Healthcare organisations are already experiencing many of the problems that manufacturers have had to deal with for several decades, namely how to turn great ‘brown paper’ plans into real changes and then how to make those changes stick. It may not be surprising to realise that up to 75% of Lean programmes will never deliver long-term change, instead consisting of a series of exciting (yet ultimately wasteful) Rapid Improvement Events, and that is the same in healthcare as it is in manufacturing.

The choices for healthcare organisations going Lean is either to do it properly and ensure that the changes stick, which can be very demanding of management time, or trying a few isolated projects where the benefits ultimately drift away.

The key to success is to ensure that you adopt an approach to Lean that is flexible for your organisation and not rigidly imposed by a management consultancy to suit them and also to develop the internal capability of your staff as quickly as possible so that they can take the reins for your improvement programme. Ensuring all of this works is where the leadership team need to ensure that the targets they set for their Lean projects will deliver the organisational objectives and that everyone, from the boardroom to the wards, understands what needs to be done, why and by when.

This article was taken from Training Bulletin and is run by a company called amnis if you wish to get more details on this follow this link Accelerated Lean Skills Programme.

This is a hotly debated subject some experts argue that there is no difference between the two terms and that they can be used interchangeably. Those who argue that there is a difference claim that that personnel is more administrative (dealing with payroll etc.) whereas Human Resource is responsible for managing the workforce (recruitment, conflict resolution etc.). It is argued that Personnel are reactive providing a response to demands as they are present themselves on the other hand HR is proactive because it involves the development of functions and policies for the purposes of improving the workforce.

Most people argue that those who claim that there is a difference fail to explain the differences in day to day roles of both titles. Those that say that there is a difference claim that it is a subtle philosophical one, Sultan Chand claimed that Personnel are motivated by compensation, rewards and job simplification. HR considers work groups, challenges and creativity on the job as motivational factors. In Personnel (which is also called personnel management) improved satisfaction is deemed to be the cause for improved performance but in HR it is the other way round; performance is the cause and satisfaction is the result.

So in conclusion there are a few subtle differences although some businesses do use the terms interchangeably, without detrimental effects to their business therefore one can assume that the differences described above are not significant enough to have any real effect.