We all know knowledge is power. This makes information – and data – the wind beneath knowledge’s wings. Kathleen McGrow, Chief Nursing Information Officer for the Microsoft Health & Life Science Industry Team, believes nurse informaticists and Artificial Intelligence will revolutionise healthcare across the world.

Kathleen McGrow’s clinical background includes many years as a trauma nurse and building an electronic health record system for the Amazon basin. She’s also worked at GE Healthcare, Phillips, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland trauma resuscitation unit. During her time things have changed beyond recognition.

Having experienced computer systems built by engineers who never went near a hospital ward, let alone asked nurses what they wanted, she could see the potential in developing user-friendly tech to help healthcare workers. So her next adventure saw her taking a Master's in nursing informatics.

Kathleen believes that a lot of power from the frontline was given away in the early days, and organisations still deploy systems that don't necessarily meet the needs of the workflow. With hindsight, data wasn’t collected and stored in a truly useful way. And now that computers, tablets and phones are used in wards, do they create a barrier between the practitioner and patient?

AI is going to be huge in automating manual processing for nurses, Kathleen believes, with the possibilities being transformative – from imaging helping to stage wounds, to automating everyday manual processes. It’s just a case of working out the best way to fit that into the process.

In the face of growing challenges such as ageing populations, decreasing birth rates and a lack of new talent coming into nursing, Kathleen believes AI can not only take on some less technical roles but has great potential for education. Making your organisation open to digital improvement is vital and nurse informaticists can be thought leaders in this.

Find out Kathleen’s predictions for the future of healthcare including:

• Why there will be more Hospital at Home
• Why ambient experience or voice recognition is going to be huge in nursing
• Why generational differences in healthcare staff should be given more attention
• Why interoperability and standardisation are crucial
• And why it’s more important than ever that we look after healthcare staff properly

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“Leadership for improvement starts at the very top and has to be authentically led from the chief executive and the board all the way through the organisation. But their role is very much the sponsor, rather than to be involved in the day-to-day work.”

In this episode, Lara and Na’eem talk to quality improvement guru, Dr Amar Shah. Amar is Chief Quality Officer at East London NHS Foundation Trust and a consultant forensic psychiatrist. He is national improvement lead for mental health at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and honorary visiting professor at City University and the University of Leicester. He is also an improvement advisor and faculty member for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, teaching and guiding improvers and healthcare systems across the world.

From Amar’s first foray into improvement work, and his view of quality improvement as a method, a process and a mindset, through to how organisations need to establish the right infrastructure for quality improvement, this far-reaching discussion touches on so many aspects of this crucial area of healthcare. Discover Amar’s perspective on how:

• the command-and-control structure of the NHS needs to be devolved for effective quality improvement;
• leadership needs to understand that they are no longer there to solve problems but to empower and coach others to solve problems;
• too much quality improvement can be dangerous;
• keeping it simple and enabling people to make a difference is vital;
• quality improvement can produce evidence for service redesign;
• quality improvement needs to be part of the management system, alongside planning, assurance and quality control; and
• equity will be one next areas of focus for quality improvement.

Plus, discover a Small But Mighty idea, that is supremely powerful in building relationships and bonds between colleagues.

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“NHS staff already know how to improve things – we just now need to give them a voice.” So says Nicola McQueen, CEO of NHS Professionals – the largest temporary staff supplier to the NHS (which provides just over 3.5 million clinical hours every month) – and CEO of Doctors Direct, the locum service for NHS Professionals. She is also non-executive director of ImproveWell. Here she shares her experience of mobilising huge swathes of staff during the pandemic with Lara Mott and Na’eem Ahmed.

“Nobody told me in my interview that I was about to lead a business through a pandemic!” To say Nicola was thrown into the deep end (after just five months on the job) would be an understatement. But good things happen in hard times, as she tells us. And after 20 years in staffing strategy, she found there was still more to learn.

At first, a vigorous sense of mission was more crucial than ever – and at NHS Professionals this was getting as many workers to the frontline as quickly as they possibly could. “Anything that was going on in the business at that time, if it wasn't to do with [that mission], we just stopped it and we stopped it flat,” explains Nicola. But on top of this, efficiency needed to rocket, and empathy brought to the fore. There was a feeling of connectedness in that everyone was throwing themselves at the cause. But, as Nicola points out, “we're not all in the same boat, we just happen to be sailing in these same unpredictable seas”. Nicola’s mission became about “promoting honesty, integrity, accountability,” as well as making the organisation “agile, flexible, fast and creative”.

Find out why:

• welcoming and celebrating staff is about more than paying lip service;
• empathy in leadership is more important than ever;
• the ‘sprint then fall off the cliff’ mentality is lethal – downtime needs to be in-built;
• we do need to sweat the small stuff;
• technology is important in the journey;
• building in long-haul energy is a long-term goal; and
• looking after the workforce is a key priority.

“We've got a huge responsibility to try and keep hold of all of those people that stepped up through the pandemic.” Everybody has got staff retention at the forefront of their mind with the huge labour shortage the NHS is facing. “I think that making sure that we're addressing staff experience is just more important than ever now,” she says.

Plus, discover a no-brainer of a Small But Mighty idea, which has saved a lot of time and frustration.

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Connect with Nicola, Na’eem and Lara on LinkedIn

Follow Nicola on Twitter