Student nurses at The University of Nottingham have held a successful pledging event for NHS Change Day 2014 - one of the largest social movements of its kind anywhere in the world. (Pictured - Emma Batty, Nick Lowe, Vicky Lonsdale, Natasha McVey, Lauren Bark and Chantelle Hughes)
NHS Change Day – which took place this year on 3 March – is a frontline 'Call to Action' for NHS staff, patients and the public.
The idea is to get as many people as possible to pledge to do one thing to make the NHS better. Pledges can be big or small, personal or professional, but must make a difference to patient care.
Student nurses from the Nottingham University Hospitals Student Task Group ran a pledging event on the 21 February, encouraging students and University staff to make pledges for NHS Change Day. An incredible 77 individual pledges were made on the day!
The students who organised and ran the event said: "We wanted to run an event to raise the awareness of Change Day among all healthcare students at the University. We have had some fantastic pledges from both students and staff and we were very pleased to see our Head of School, Professor Patrick Callaghan, leading the way for staff and making a fantastic pledge! Students are the future of our NHS, so getting them to engage with and support a culture for change and improvement is so important."
The Student Task Group also made a group pledge: "We pledge to continue to provide a strong partnership and sustainable relationship between The University of Nottingham and Nottingham University Hospitals Trust. We pledge to recruit enthusiastic, passionate and motivated student nurses in order to provide a platform for students to voice issues and ideas. We will bridge the gap between theory and practice and provide a forum which encourages innovation and inspires nursing pride."
NHS Change Day started in March 2013 with a conversation on twitter between junior doctors and improvement leaders, about what they could do to improve the care for their own patients. Their Twitter conversation caught the imagination of staff and patients all over the country and grew into a social movement that generated nearly 200,000 pledges to make one small positive change to the NHS. This year Change Day is hoping to generate half a million new pledges.
Dr Damian Roland, Senior Paediatric Registrar at Leicester Hospitals and one of the founders of NHS Change Day, said: "We all have a role to play in making the NHS better – which is exactly what NHS Change Day is all about. One person saying thank you to an NHS staff member, or deciding not to miss an appointment, won’t make a big difference. But if on one day of the year many thousands of people were inspired to do it, the scale of the change, and the momentum it could create, would be staggering."
NHS Change Day is already having a big impact. Example pledges from last year include:
- A paediatrician who tasted the medicines he was prescribing to his patients and, when he realised many of them were pretty unpalatable, started working with his pharmacy to change the flavour
- A student nurse who set up a mock ward so students could experience care from the patient’s perspective, which has now been added to the university curriculum
- A GP who spent the day in a wheelchair to understand how his disabled patients felt
- A doctor’s surgery where staff switched off the electronic message board for a day and asked for patients by name to re-engage with them.
To find out more or make your own pledge for NHS Change Day, go to www.changeday.nhs.uk
Posted on Friday 14th March 2014