NHS Change Day 2014

Friday, 7th March 2014

Thousands of people who work in the NHS are pledging to do something different to improve care standards as part of NHS Change Day 2014.

Last year 189,000 people took part making a pledge on-line and in 2014 there is a hope that there will be 500,000 pledges made.

NHS Change Day started in the summer of 2012 following a conversation on Twitter between a group of trainee doctors and improvement leaders after they had all attended an NHS leadership course. They began exchanging ideas and developed a shared vision about bringing together staff across the NHS and its supporters to produce positive change and improvement.

This year there have been pledges from all levels of staff across the service including chief executives, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, cleaners and porters. These pledges include a ward nurse sharing a cup of tea with patients that get few visitors, a paediatrician tasting medicines that he regularly prescribes for children and working with the pharmacy staff to improve the flavour, an orthopaedic surgeon lying on a spinal board for an hour to experience the position he asks his patients to lie in. A GP to spend a day in a wheelchair, a porter to spend a day moving about his hospital on a transport trolley and a NHS manager to give up a week of lunch breaks to help feed the patients in the elderly care wards who have dementia.

Dr Peter Roland one of the pledgees said “NHS day is about breaking down traditional barriers and recognising that everyone who works in, uses or cares about the NHS has the power to make a difference. A single pledge might not sound like much on the face of it, but when hundreds of thousands of people from every part of the NHS join forces with the patients to pledge it can create massive momentum for improvement.”

You can make a pledge until 31st March by going onto www.changeday.nhs.uk