FEATURE


Starting a new role is always a little daunting. When I joined NRS healthcare in early 2022, I was excited to tackle a new, bigger challenge.


NRS delivers a range of medical equipment and services to NHS trusts and local authorities across the country. Our work impacts some of the country's most vulnerable people, and we take that responsibility very seriously. In our business, every interaction you have with the end user has to be excellent.


There’s no room for mistakes when it comes to people’s health, and we extend that commitment to our own people internally. As the Head of HSE, I’m pushing our internal standards beyond compliance, and towards a commitment to first-class health and safety.


Central to all of this is the use of our workplace operations platform, SafetyCulture. Partnering with their team has helped me and my team to realise our aspirations. This partnership is showing serious results: NRS Healthcare recently received its first- ever 100% perfect score as part of an NHS commissioning audit.


I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done at NRS to achieve what we have. As HSE practitioners, by following a few key tactics we’re keeping our teams safer, healthier, and happier than ever before - so we can do the same for patients.


BUILD YOUR EFFORTS AROUND


A FRAMEWORK There are too many QHSE professionals applying a scattershot approach to their work. It’s understandable; many are under immense pressure with under-skilled teams, dangerous environments, and tight commercial pressures. Unfortunately, this approach is doomed to fail in the long term as it’s unlikely to build the kind of internal safety culture required to achieve true excellence.


My advice is to add some structure to your work to reap the rewards. We’ve known for a long time that to accelerate continuous improvement, it needs to be built into your business processes.


But you don't always have to do the heavy liſting yourself, as there are tools out there that can do that for you. At NRS, we use SafetyCulture as our primary digital safety tool. From inspections and reporting, to communication and scheduling, the features are available on our mobile devices, making it easy for me to build up our everyday health and safety activity around a framework where each action feeds into others, all in one place.


GET YOUR WORKERS ENGAGED FROM


DAY ONE People tend not to like change. Anyone who has led a team for any amount of time will be able to tell you that. The best leaders overcome this resistance by getting stakeholders equally invested in change, and crucially, using their feedback to shape how it evolves. If everyone can see a positive impact from the change, you’ll find that resistance melts away.


Practically, you do this by making it as simple as possible for people to adopt the change. At NRS Healthcare, we’ve increased the number of inspections conducted and reported on by over 50%. In turn, this has reduced RIDDOR accidents by 63%.


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By adopting a simple tool that everyone can just have on their phone to easily conduct an inspection, we did away with paper, collected better information in inspections, and created a win- win for everyone. This meant that we could keep up employee engagement in these new, important practices, by making it as easy as possible to adopt.


MAKE DATA-POWERED DECISIONS


This one seems obvious, but I see people get in a muddle over it all the time. With all the data points we have at our fingertips nowadays, it can be hard to decipher what the true insights are. My advice? The classic KISS: ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’.


Choose three metrics that are really important to you. This could be reducing the number of accidents, sickness rates, improving internal safety sentiments, or whatever is important to your organisation. Digital inspection and auditing tools will help you to measure these goals, and show you the progress you’re making to achieve them.


You can measure everything else too, but by remaining laser- focused on those three key metrics, you can keep your strategy on track and avoid the scattershot approach that works for no one.


It’s also important to validate and justify your decisions with data. You will quickly discover your continuous improvement cycle speeds up, getting you closer to your goals faster than ever.


CONSISTENT, CLEAR,


TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION If you can be certain of anything, it’s that things change. Whether it's some equipment needing maintenance, someone on the team is off, or you’re making a process change – you need to keep your people in the loop.


How you do this is up to you. All that matters is that it’s clear, easily accessible, and everyone can have an opportunity to get more clarity. No more long email chains or posters in the staff room.


We use SafetyCulture’s HeadsUp feature to send regular video updates to our teams, with the additional benefit that we can ask for them to acknowledge the video. This means wherever they are, I know that the information has registered with them. They can even leave comments and ask questions if they need additional support, at the touch of a button on their mobile phone.


MAKE HEALTH AND SAFETY A


COMMERCIAL ADVANTAGE In our commercially driven world, health and safety can sometimes take a back seat to other factors – but this absolutely shouldn’t be the norm.


We use our exemplary health and safety record as a commercial advantage. We always show commissioners our reports and inspections, and now we can show them our policy and then evidence them with the SafetyCulture report – which is really invaluable to getting those all-important 100% perfect scores.


Think about it - how oſten when engaging another business can they show you empirical evidence of what they can achieve? With the health of their service users top of mind, commissioners gain a lot of confidence in choosing a partner they know can live up to their expectations.


www.nrshealthcare.com - 37 -


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