Appreciating Health and Care – share your case studies

Advancing Quality Alliance (Aqua), Appreciating People, and West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WMAHSN) are currently working in partnership to produce “Appreciating Health and Care,” a book and practical resource for anyone involved in health and social care.

The book will look to build on the many great examples of where Appreciative Inquiry, has been used in health and care settings for quality and safety improvement. It will look to provide the health and care workforce with guidance and methodologies, plus case studies highlighting real world examples of application. It will provide practical tools, activities and guidance for individuals, teams and organisations to not only generate conversations but foster an appreciative culture towards improvement.

The book will be published in Autumn 2023/24. In the meantime, we want to keep you updated with our progress, sharing some of the activities, snippets from the case studies and some short videos.

Appreciating health and care has never been more important following the challenges which have been faced over the last couple of years with the Covid-19 pandemic, significant workforce pressures and the ever-growing demand of our services. Whilst we are all aware of the challenges, there are so many wonderful examples of staff going the extra mile, improvements being made to support those we care for and work with. This practical resource will be a real opportunity to highlight the best of health and care.

Our initial ask: share with us your examples of appreciative inquiry in action

A central part of the Appreciating Health and Care resource will be to share “Appreciative Inquiry (AI) stories.” This approach will be very much in the spirit of AI, building on the AI importance of narrative, and should be easy for people to create and access. We are interested in stories that relate to safety, personalised care, experience and wellbeing, learning from the pandemic, building resilience and cultural changes.

We are looking for two types of AI stories:

• Examples using the full set of tools, principles, 5Ds etc. These can be reasonably full, although as we will be editing them to fit the workbook format it will help if you have selected the highlights of what you did (see below).
• Smaller stories describing how the use of AI questions and conversations were generative in existing health and social activities and situations. E.g., using simple paired conversations as a way of starting a meeting or how an AI intervention highlighted an AI principle at play.

We are keen to capture the questions, conversation protocols, tasks used and exercises created. They can be either included within the story or recommended for inclusion in the resources section.

Here are some helpful hints:

• Remember you are writing for a wider audience who will not always know the context.
• Include images and photographs wherever possible so that we can select the most appropriate.
• AI stories are about demonstrating AI in action from the micro to the macro and large-scale organisation approach.
• Readers value practical and accessible resources, so include any protocols, questions and activities.
• Although this publication will contain a glossary of terms remember to spell out the jargon and if appropriate provide an explanation at the end of example.
• Explain what you intended to do and why – include the outcomes you hoped for.
• Share the journey and if it involved AI tools such as a protocol, 5D or SOAR explain why and what they did.
• Mention any of the AI principles that have been particularly important in the process.
• Share any impact, especially any generative shift.
• Share any learning emerging from the AI intervention especially what you would do different next time.
• Remember to get your organisation’s permission for article content.
• If appropriate explain what happened next and the impact – what you noticed.
• Describe how you celebrated it!
• Don’t forget to add your name, and brief three-line description of what you do.

“It is a privilege to be working with Aqua and WMAHSN to create this important Appreciative Inquiry learning resource. They have been our key partners supporting the introduction of AI to numerous NHS trusts, and to the care home sector over the last 8 years.  Through those programmes we have met so many excellent NHS staff, and are full of admiration for the various ways in which they have applied  AI – our hope is that this book will be a way of sharing as many of those as possible.”

-Suzanne Quinney, Co-director Appreciating People

If you have an AI story you would like to share, please email us some of the basic details no later than 19 December 2022. Following this there will be some time for you to build on the AI stories and write them up in full by March 2023.

Please send your AI story, or any queries you have, to Brook Howells, Senior Improvement Advisor, Aqua.