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:
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:
“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.