Outstanding Log

Welcome back and thanks for the feedback about last week’s post on the “One Drawer Inspection Kit”; please keep in touch and share your feedback if you have implemented the One Drawer Inspection Kit or any of the other suggestions we have shared. We would love to hear from you!

This week’s article will be a little shorter but, hopefully, just as valuable – the “Outstanding Log”.

We can’t take credit for this idea; one of the team leaders on a Lead to Succeed programme shared this a few months’ back. Essentially, the team leader described what she had done to implement this in her setting and the impact that it had on her team, but also the volume of evidence they collected using it. It goes something like this:

They added a simple question to their handover process: “what have we done that is outstanding today?” Now that will only take seconds to ask, but the impact of that question is huge, because it gets everyone thinking “what have I done today?”, “was that outstanding?” and, as such, it can create a shift in mindset for the staff.

Now let’s be clear, outstanding according to CQC means: “the service is performing exceptionally well”, so we are beyond meeting expectations – we are exceeding them.

So, another way of phrasing the same question might be “what have we done that is exceptional today?” By incorporating this simple question into the handover process or perhaps a team meeting if that works better for you in your setting, staff know that question will be asked and the mindset shift it creates is they will start looking for examples to share in that meeting, because that is just how our minds work – we can’t help it!

However, the critical piece of the jigsaw is how we record what gets shared…

If it is therefore part of the handover, create a space on the handover documentation which gets completed with a brief description of what happened and why it is exceptional. Similarly, if it is part of the team meeting, then find a way of capturing the “exceptional”.

Bear in mind that you won’t capture examples on every shift or every team meeting, but hopefully what will happen over time is that you capture examples that build into something extremely valuable, for what is essentially a small investment of time.

Think back to what I said last week: use the One Drawer Inspection Kit to give the inspectors a map to follow, then use the “outstanding log” to capture all the reasons why you are exceptional and make it is the first thing you give them when they arrive!