Charlotte Keates

Nurse Manger within Emergency Services, Royal Wolverhampton NHS trust

Hello my name is Charlotte and I have been fortunate to be accepted onto the Inspire Improvement programme 2019. Having been a nurse manager for a number of years I have always been looking for a way to bring the teams I manage closer together and working towards the same vision underpinned by the same values. Being given the opportunity to become an Inspire improvement fellow is a very exciting proposition for me as I believe that I have found the tools I have been looking for to achieve my goals. I work in a busy and at times stressful environment with daily growing pressures and targets to meet. These pressures have an effect on both the nursing and medical teams and I believe that they need to come together and reassess what their vision is for the area in which they work. I think the tools that I will be given from Inspire Improvement will help to realign the teams and create the truly caring culture that we need. This in turn will have a positive impact on the patients which we care for who quite often are entering a hospital environment both scared and with a sense of lack of control. I hope to see the patients come into contact with a team who put them at the centre of care and they see the values upheld by every member of that team. I also hope to see the benefits of a consistent and driven workforce striving for excellence in care.

I am a registered Operating Department Practitioner (ODP) and have been qualified for 22 years and currently work in the role of Anaesthetic Team Leader. This involves leading a team of 20 anaesthetic nurses and ODPs, at the Whittington Hospital.

The hospital has 11 operating theatres currently, with a second maternity operating theatre being built. The anaesthetic team work across several different surgical specialities; adult and paediatric, help provide anaesthesia in outlying areas and are a part of the hospital cardiac arrest team.

I’m interested in the move within healthcare towards a so called “culture of patient safety” and how this can be achieved. Clearly, improvement is something that is constant and ongoing. The technological developments in healthcare, have brought with them better outcomes and patient experience; but also a daily environment of increasing complexity, where tasks are sometimes duplicated on paper and on a computer, so that the data can be collected. However, trying to change a culture within this complexity and how everyone contributes to that culture, is what interests me.

The Inspire Improvement Fellowship 2019 is a fantastic opportunity to explore this complexity, as well as add to my leadership toolkit, in ways that I hope will be beneficial for patients, my team and the wider department.