Katie Miller

We are a Bristol charity caring for adults with life limiting illnesses. The aim of the hospice is to improve the quality of their living and dying while extending care and support to families and loved ones. We provide physical, psychological and spiritual care for our patients in their own homes as well as at the hospice. I manage the day services department, which runs day programmes for people with life limiting illnesses and their families. Within my team there are registered nurses, occupational therapists, complementary therapists, health care assistants and volunteers.

I would like to explore different ways to enhance our service, identify areas where change would be beneficial and provide a more positive and enabling culture within my team. This programme will give me the opportunity to ‘step back’ and look at what I and the team actually do, evaluate our practice and identify ways of ‘doing it even better’.

I am hoping to benefit greatly from sharing ideas and learning with and from other leaders. My aspiration is to become a better leader and facilitator. I see the FoNS Inspire Improvement Fellowship programme as an excellent opportunity to help me develop my skills and confidence further so I am better placed  to overcome the hurdles of the job and make the services I lead a fantastic patient experience;  working closely with my whole staff team to achieve this.

There have been some considerable periods of change within my organisation and my service /team over the past few years. I have an ambition to develop the team into a responsive and creative multi-disciplinary team.

The inspire Improvement programme will enable me to evaluate my current practice and identify possible different ways of working with my team in order to create a more meaningful, safe and caring culture; the ultimate aim to be giving the best care to patients and their families in the best environment.

I envisage that through working together, the team will develop a ‘shared focus’ and help me to identify gaps in what we do and how to do it better. It will enable us to improve our evaluation processes ensuring that we are all working from the same place in terms of our values and vision for the service.

I feel I will have more confidence in identifying people’s individual skills so that they are working to their best ability. Enabling staff to flourish is key, I think, in creating a more positive culture and enabling change to benefit the patients and families that use our services.

I aim to engage with my service users with the added benefit of my newly aquired knowledge, to talk about their experiences so that informed changes can be made to enhance their care and support. Working together as a team, and with increased skills and confidence, we are better placed to actively listen to our patients and families and fully understand what they need so that we can ensure we are providing the very best experiences and care for them.