Earlier this year Engage for Success were delighted to launch a new partnership with The Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) to run a series of practical, focussed employee engagement events across the UK designed to enable HPMA members to tackle their employee engagement challenges.
The vision is for HPMA branches across the UK to work with regional E4S ambassadors to develop practitioner events; bringing practical help, advice and network 
support for HR, OD and workforce teams across the health services.
The first two of these events have kicked off in the Midlands with an event on 21st February in Birmingham and 5th March in Nottingham. These events were run in partnership with David Holmes, West Midlands Vice President, HPMA, Amanda Rawlings, East Midlands Vice President HPMA and Raffaela Goodby Regional Ambassador for West Midlands and Head of OD for Birmingham City Council, Rebecca Normand Engage for Success (seconded by CIPD) and Laura Buckthorpe Engage for Success (seconded by Nampak).
The inaugural event in Birmingham in February saw an evidence based presentation from Professor Peter Spurgeon, from Medical School University of Warwick, who provided a really interesting insight to the work undertaken on Medical Engagement and Organisational Performance.
Joanne Thurston, Director of Compliance and Assurance at Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust followed on with an excellent case study on the Trusts’ approach to staff engagement based on a ‘Values” approach. The presentation highlighted the importance of leadership and the line managers role and the time it takes to embed change.
Regional ambassador Raffaela Goodby then led the exercise on the four enablers where challenges were raised around the differences in engaging clinical and non clinical employees, and the impact of lack of senior commitment on engagement. There was also significant discussion around integrity and the challenge that merging organisations face with multiple sets of values. The session finished with participants setting up 30 ‘engagement dates’ to maintain the momentum and contacts after the event. The HPMA West Midlands plan to hold another event later in the year involving wider public sector colleagues.
At the East Midlands event, sponsored by Capsticks in Nottingham, the practitioners were joined by Nita Clarke OBE Co-Chair of the Engage for Success movement and Paul Taylor National Lead on ‘Do OD’ from NHS Employers. Birmingham City Council presented an energetic whistle stop tour to their engagement journey, Paul Taylor shared his models on national OD interventions and the clear focus NHS employers place on employee engagement, as well as sharing some of the free toolkits and research available for practitioners. Nita Clarke gave an inspiring presentation on the movement highlighting the NHS examples and research available and taking questions.
The Nottingham enablers session was then run by Bec, Laura and Raffaela who then awarded the most coveted ‘Engage for Success pins’ to the examples of best practise from across the region. The enablers session raised successes as well as challenges from the practitioners with examples of risk taking that has really paid off, as well as some communication engagement challenges between sites where trusts have merged. There were a number of positive examples of clinician engagement in practise and lots of enthusiastic tweeters were at work on the day which you can read on twitter through #e4s or #hpma. Huge thanks to Amanda Rawlings for organising the event.
HPMA President Kevin Croft said, ‘The evidence on how staff engagement affects patient care is clear but many NHS organisations still have challenges with improving staff engagement. We are really excited about working with Engage for Success and others from outside the NHS to try and make a real difference to the quality of patient care across the UK’
Former Engage for Success Programme Director Wendy Leedham said Engage for Success is excited to be working in partnership with HPMA to connect practitioners across the UK. This is so timely with the national focus on public service collaborating at a local level to deliver joined up services to citizens. Using employee engagement as a focal point is going to bring clear benefits for practitioners, their organisations, and employee morale nationally.”
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http://www.engageforsuccess.org/hpma-excellence-hrm-awards-2014-programme/
