We were delighted to welcome guests from The Health Foundation’s Q Community to Mayden HQ earlier this month for their second annual visit.
The Q Community is “an initiative connecting people, who have improvement expertise, across the UK….. sharing ideas, enhancing skills and collaborating to make health and care better.”
The focus of the day was to explore how taking a different approach to organising work and people can impact results, and this session focussed on continuous improvement in healthcare.
The day kicked off with coffee and pastries (what else!) before the team got down to business. Delegates heard from specialists at Mayden about their experiences implementing agile working practices, including the challenges, the benefits and the practicalities. They took part in interactive team activities based on agile and Scrum principles designed to get them thinking about how improvements could be made in service delivery through introducing new ways of working.
In a fun, hands on session with big boxes of Lego (because who doesn’t love Lego?) the teams were able to apply and test their learning by working in a mini scrum session to design and build the ideal intergalactic hotel for martians and humans…..
In addition to explaining the fundamentals of implementing agile principles, Mayden’s agile specialists shared our recent company-wide journey to improve our own way of working for the benefit of our clients and staff, with the goal of continuing to build a sustainable organisation that is fit for the future.
Emma Adams of the Health Transformation Partnership summed up her day:
‘We loved bringing the Q Community members to Mayden again. The team gave us an interesting, fun and engaging day with time for reflection and consideration of how we might use agile principles and artefacts to help us improve healthcare. Q members appreciated how knowledgeable, open and honest the team were, alongside their obvious enthusiasm and willingness to share’.
A Q member and participant in the session commented:
‘The whole day has been brilliant, a great pace and energy, lots of useable
information, great atmosphere and opportunities to network too. Thank you.’
It was a privilege to host the Q Community and we were delighted to provide a space for their members to come together, to share ideas and to learn from each other. We are sharing our own experiences of continuous improvement – including how we introduced agile principles to Mayden and why we embarked on a new way of working – in the hope that other organisations can learn from us and learn with us, avoid some of the pitfalls we have encountered along the way, and gain confidence from hearing about our successes.
