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“There's no such thing as the unknown—only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” James T. Kirk, Captain, Starship Enterprise. Star Trek, Season 1: The Corbomite Maneuver. Leading a large enterprise isn’t easy. Vision, compassion, humility, curiosity and adaptability are required attributes for those in charge to keep moving forward during times of relative calm or uncertainty. The stress and tragedy that accompanies catastrophic events can reduce the resolve and effectiveness of even the most accomplished leaders. Unprecedented large-scale situations, such as the Hurricane Katrina landfall or the September 11th terrorist attacks, reveal gaps in understanding that may not have been apparent before the disaster. These blind spots can dismantle the reserve of a leader and their team to culminate in poor decisions, inaction and organisational dysfunction. The COVID-19 pandemic is such an event. Rules are being mindfully adjusted to respond to the litany of process, clinical, financial and political disruptions healthcare workers must grapple with as they face the uncertain conditions of their patients, communities and themselves. It is incumbent on leaders to create stability by addressing these unknowns. Leaders within hospitals, social care organisations and within the public health spectra need to make immediate process adjustments to optimise effort, realise opportunities for improvement and learn to be resilient. They need to arrive at understanding while simultaneously managing challenges that emerge from the strained system to keep their enterprise on track. They need to do this by paying attention to safety culture, transformation and innovation, and will need tools and resources to do so. Leadership must build a culture to keep patients and workers safe. Leader’s communications and actions are core to the implementation of safe working conditions to provide the best care possible during a crisis. Yet, a Gallup poll of US healthcare workers found a lack of understanding of their organisation’s COVID-19 plan and lack of belief that safety policies in place will support their safe return to work. To address this gap, experts recommend leaders three steps to a better safety culture: use formal and informal mechanisms to explicitly communicate what the organisation is doing to keep staff informed and safe during the pandemic enlist their managers to implement policies, create opportunities to align the work of management and hold managers accountable to implement and sustain current practice and procedure talk to their people. Keeping an open dialogue through the use of established mechanisms such as ‘rounding’ can solicit insights and raise concerns to enhance the safety of teams and patients. Leadership must see opportunities to transform systems: COVID-19 has presented leaders with immense responsibility to act, adjust quickly as required and use those process changes to improve the overall system of care post-pandemic in preparation for the next unprecedented challenge. Geisinger Health System leaders in their article, 'How one health system is transforming in response to Covid-19' share the experience of designing their emerging COVID response to reliably innovate rather than only react. Leaders examined core system business concerns such as pharmacy and information technology by bringing together multidisciplinary groups that dismantled silos. Teams worked together using scenario planning to fully consider how restoring care processes, entering new work phases, preparing for the second wave and restoring financial viability would affect patients and employees. Leadership must use evidence and collective knowledge to adapt: The Journal of Public Health and Management Practice shares recommendations for leaders to meet COVID-19 stressors successfully. The article suggests leaders communicate well, be decisive, lead without hierarchy, remain proactive and take care of themselves to protect others. For example, to lead across a system seek expertise from a variety of organisational and environmental elements. Working with government officials, staff and peers can form collaborations, solidify shared purpose and distribute responsibility to serve a community well in crisis. Public health is a core partner in understanding how to guide, motivate and inspire change to enhance a collective response to COVID-19 and upcoming health threats. Clinicians in patient-facing leadership roles also exhibit these behaviours as their roles shift to manage crisis. The perspective of a New York cardiologist leading a COVID-19 infections disease service illustrates how the transfer of tacit knowledge around deliberate leadership observed daily while coordinating the service shaped his views on leadership and his ability to lead. Being emotionally available was a core characteristic that helped to express grief, exhibit vulnerability and openly share concerns, giving the experience the humanness it needed. This was important not only in his ability to mature as a leader but to demonstrate the empathy needed to get his team through the challenges at hand. James T Kirk knew how to lead. He sought consensus, learned from mistakes, yet acted as necessary to keep his crew safe, engaged and aligned with the organisational mission. He sought partners across the federation as needed. Kirk could be firm, decisive, yet empathetic. Have health leaders done similarly to protect staff, patients and the community, while gaining experience during COVID-19 to apply over time to enrich the care system at large and boldly go to a better, safer future?

Here are just some of East Midlands AHSN programmes: ESCAPE – pain 374 people received life-changing rehabilitation helping them to live with osteoarthritis. Focus ADHD – East Midlands ADHD programme to improve ADHD diagnosis for children and young people selected for national adoption and spread. ChatHealth – Secure health messaging service reaches 100% coverage for young people in the East Midlands. Digital outpatient appointment follow up – Trust’s Oncology clinical specialty reduced unnecessary follow up appointments by 97% in one pathway using digital approach. Transfers of Care Around Medicines – Over 12,000 at-risk patients received additional support with their medications when leaving hospital. Patient safety work with care homes – Commitment by East Midlands care homes to their residents’ safety applauded by national health and care system leaders. Atrial Fibrillation – 220 strokes avoided and 73 lives saved across East Midlands.

Achievements Reviewed more than 300 innovations and supported the adoption of 50 of them. Prevented 30 strokes per year through atrial fibrillation initiatives in primary care. Met 500 companies and established 30 industry partnerships. Leveraged £123m to improve health in our region and support economic growth. Key local projects Mental health: Relapse prevention following psychological therapy – includes launch of Paddle smartphone app providing ongoing support for patients. Heart failure: Improving treatment in primary care – working with Novartis to deliver better patient outcomes and reduce hospital admissions. Sleep improvement: Enhancing mental health and self-care at scale – real-world evaluation of the experiences of thousands of people who used the Sleepio online digital support programme. Maternity: Developing an e-learning package for fetal heart rate monitoring – helping midwifery colleagues deliver an award-winning tool developed in Reading/Oxford. Key national programmes Reducing stroke risk: Working with all clinical commissioning groups and primary care, sharing learning and spreading best practice to reduce strokes related to atrial fibrillation, diagnosing 3,000 more patient. Better outcomes following emergency surgery: Working with the five acute NHS trusts in the Oxford AHSN region which perform emergency laparotomy surgery, reducing mortality and length of stay for more than 800 patients. Preventing cerebral palsy: Promoting the adoption and spread of magnesium sulphate in pre-term labour through the ‘PReCePT’ initiative, sustaining uptake at over 85% and improving life-chances of more than 100 babies. Reducing medication errors: Working with all CCGs, pharmacists and GPs to train almost 200 practices in our region through the PINCER programme.

Over the last 3 months we have seen NHS organisations work at lightning speed to adapt and serve their communities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the shutting down of routine surgeries and outpatient services, care providers have adapted in an extraordinary way. Wards have been emptied as beds have been made available, while theatres and recovery rooms have been turned into intensive care beds – capable of looking after acutely unwell ‘level 3’ patients – overnight. These unprecedented changes deserve praise and commendation but, beyond this praise, what can we learn from COVID-19 and the scale of change we have seen? It was famously argued that it takes 17 years for research to impact frontline services.[1] . Due to this, immense interest has centered around how innovations, or new ideas, are diffused and how this process can be sped up.[2] Various barriers exist to the spread of new ideas and change – not limited to bureaucracy, a lack of resources to create change, and cultures – for example organisational culture. Due to these barriers the NHS and its subsequent organisations can appear as monolithic – slow to change or adapt to any innovations. But COVID-19 has turned this assumption on its head, with expansive structural and procedural overhaul seen in the last few months alone. It has led observers to ask how this has happened and, more importantly, how we can facilitate change in the future. As we reflect on these months, the psychology of a crisis can be helpful in understanding staff behaviour. There are three stages – emergency, regression and recovery.[3] In the emergency stage, energy and performance goes up as staff ‘fire fight’ in the crisis. However, the move towards the regression and recovery stage will see staff become tired and lose their sense of purpose before needing direction on how to recover and rebuild. These latter stages are symptomatic of the current state for NHS staff. Utilising theories of change, perhaps we can identify why this change happened so quickly. The impending doom felt by staff was palpable in March. The Nightingale field hospital was being built to cope with the immediate storm of COVID-19 patients needing ventilatory support and providers were told to free up beds. In business, this is coined the ‘burning platform’ and is a key driver of change. A burning platform is a term which describes the process of informing people of an impending crisis and is used to cultivate immediate change. This ‘burning platform’ is a simple analogy and based on an incident in 1988 of an oil rig worker who, when faced with an impending burning platform, jumped into freezing water. Whilst of course this sense of urgency can’t be replicated every time change needs to happen, for professionals working at the start of the pandemic, this is exactly what was replicated. Perhaps change happened so fast as professionals and staff had no other choice but to respond to the burning platform of COVID-19. Creating a sense of urgency is also argued as being integral to another organisational theory of change – Kotter’s 8 Step Process for leading change. The first stage – creating a sense of urgency – is characterised by a distinctive attitude change which leads workers to seize opportunities to make changes imminently. But NHS staff have already responded to the immediate urgency presented by COVID-19, so what happens next will be telling. Apart from creating the NHS’s own burning platform, adaptations that can be seen across the NHS are not following any other theory of change. The NHS – a highly complex and bureaucratic set of organisations – has seen providers innovate, change and adapt without the traditional ‘red tape’ of the NHS. NHS providers are no longer following a model, instead working out what is best for the patients they serve. For community providers and primary care this includes virtually treating patients to limit their risk to COVID-19. Changes that have taken years to discuss are now happening overnight – for example some hospital providers integrating IT systems to improve cohesion. With so many innovations, it is crucial that we learn from what is happening. Organisations should be supported to identify and collect information on the changes that are happening on local levels. With this wealth of information, organisations can learn what made local change possible and what the drivers of innovations were. This insight is undeniably useful as it can help us all understand the drivers of change locally and galvanise change in the future. This must be made into an organisational priority. While organisations remain in firefighting mode, now is a crucial time to take stock, capture these changes, and hold on to what is useful as the NHS – and wider society – recovers. References 1. Morris Z, Wooding S, Grant J. The answer is 17 years, what is the question: Understanding time lags in translational research. J R Soc Med 2011;104:510-20. 2. Turner S, D’Lima D, Hudson E, Morris S, et al. Evidence use in decision-making on introducing innovations: A systematic scoping review with stakeholder feedback. Implementation Science 2017;12. 3. Wedell-Wedellsborg M. If You Feel Like You’re Regressing, You’re Not Alone. Harvard Business Review [Internet] 2020.

Top 10 themes: 1. Staff being valued and supported. 2. Finally using 21st century tools. 3. With engaged and visible leaders. 4. Making huge efficiency gains over the old world. 5. Working in a joined-up way across local health care. 6. Staff working together brilliantly as real teams. 7. Stepping up to work with professionalism and autonomy. 8. Creating a needs-led care system that acts proactively. 9. Making decisions mutually with patients. 10. Enjoying close community collaboration.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating an updraft to do something. Clinical, political, geographical, humanitarian, economical and logistical forces present recognisable pressures that either inspire or dissuade action ... but not for all. Innovators are energised when they see an urgent need to dismantle the status quo. They are well equipped to capitalise on the momentum generated by emergent situations to respond in a way that is collaborative, effective and safe. It is from this whirlwind that the April Letter from America is penned. Innovators can be challenging to be around. They see the world differently and can ruffle feathers with ideas that don’t stay on the well-trodden path. But when there is no normalcy, free thinking presents opportunities, necessitates unique partnerships and motivates organisational willingness to recalibrate. It is the responsibility of leaders and peers to appropriately harness this energy to make the most of opportunities that innovators present as they directly interface with patients. The willingness to innovate to address the COVID-19 pandemic is inspiring. An impressive range of solutions have been devised to meet equipment and care service access challenges. Social media is a robust and widely accessible mechanism to stimulate conversations about these ideas. #MacGyverCare is one of several Twitter streams devoted to sharing unconventional solutions. MacGyver, hub members may know, is an American TV character known to improvise to get things done in difficult circumstances. Similar to the hub's own Coronavirus Share your Tips page, people are using #MacGyverCare for sharing ideas and innovative solutions to help those on the frontline manage the demands of the crisis. Examples include creative solutions to the personal protective equipment shortage across the country. While acting to devise a new “as needed” approach may not be something everyone working directly with patients can do, there are other avenues for supporting clinicians to help them provide safe care and find comfort, resilience and even joy in that commitment. People are coming together to ‘MacGyver’ with peers during the pandemic. For example, unique partnerships with libraries are cropping up provide access to the literature, open WiFi hotspots to provide children access to school programmes and even to produce PPE. Is that a MacGyverism? At Columbia University in New York, a Research and Learning Technologies librarian partnered with a cardiology fellow to modify a freely available pattern to create face shields. Using 3D printer skills, assembly line know-how and teamwork they brought together a team to produce and distribute the equipment to staff at New York Presbyterian Hospitals. The Columbia University library shared their process to spread the innovation and encourage the wide use of their concept. At an organisational level, agile information sharing is the bedrock of crisis management. Flexible, enterprise-wide and individualised communication strategies must be in place to respond to rapidly changing circumstances and keep those touched by the situation healthy and safe. The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are using peer support and crisis communication strategies to promote institutional resilience. Leadership commitment to resilience, information sharing to reduce anxiety and support network development all buttress system efforts to assure its workforce and community remain safe and healthy both during and after a crisis. The Hopkins process brings the skills of employee assistance, chaplaincy, workplace wellness and psychiatry to the fore in a multidisciplinary team-based approach to assure staff are well situated to provide safe care while staying safe themselves. In light of the shift of resources to patients with COVID-19, delivery of services to patients with non-COVID-19 conditions must also be redesigned. The University of Wisconsin has used an administrative restructuring approach, building on military and emergency management experiences to make adjustments in surgery workforce and expertise availability to address complex shifts in care processes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Adjustments were made to synchronise work cycles to assure clinical expertise was reliably available, develop a single clinical pool to staff from rather than coordinating assignments based on speciality or educational level, and form strike teams to engage highly experienced clinicians as needed. These tactics invigorated information transfer, provided role clarity as situations changed and strengthened process sustainability. Team leaders anchored their work by remaining focused on a declared mission and guiding principles to support that mission. While the uptake of new knowledge and science into healthcare practice is often shrouded under the oft-stated “17-year lag” , it is obvious through these and other examples that care innovations can be recognised, applied and improved upon quickly. Granted, it is important for innovators and the organisations they engage with to seek the advice and council of experts from the human factors, process improvement and safety domains to ensure their new ideas are developed and flow into daily work in the safest way possible. However, after this current crisis, let one of the lessons we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic be to make patient safety progress more rapidly through the use of innovative thinking, partnerships and organisation ingenuity.

After working last week and caring for patients who were pending COVID-19 swab results, four days later I woke feeling unwell. A slight cough, tired, pale, feeling freezing cold but no temperature and generally feeling rubbish. This carried on for a few days, I then ended up with common cold-like symptoms and a residual cough. Normally, I probably wouldn’t call in sick, I would have just carried on. Following current guidance, I called in sick and was advised to take the next 7 days off. At this point testing was unavailable for NHS staff. I was sat at home not knowing if I had the virus or not while my colleagues were having to pick up the slack. If I am completely honest, I was glad I didn’t have to go back. I was anxious that we didn’t have the right personal protective equipment (PPE), systems for donning and doffing were not in place, we didn’t know what to expect over the coming days, training for redeployed nurses and doctors was not happening. I just didn’t want to go back anyway. I felt a coward. Over the coming days while I was at home, my husband then became ill, then my youngest son, then the eldest. All with mild symptoms, but still no idea if we had it or not. While I was off, I was contacted by the ‘staff welfare team’. It was just a quick phone call to see how I was, but it made all the difference. I felt like I wasn’t just a ‘worker’ off sick, I was someone that they cared about and were obviously keen to make sure I was coming back! This has never happened before. Reluctantly, I return to work, but it was like I had stepped into a different Trust. Wards with infected patients were labelled as RED wards; huge signs were outside the wards with designated places to don and doff PPE. There were clear guidance on which PPE to wear displayed in poster format. There were green footsteps and red footsteps on the floor enabling you to know which area you were in. PPE safety officers had been deployed to reassure and ensure all departments have enough stock. It felt safer. Leadership at all levels is being tested at this time. Where I work in Brighton, we are invested in ‘Patient First’. This is headed up by our Kaizen Team. All staff are trained in differing levels of quality improvement (QI). All wards and departments have improvement huddles, where they can raise a mini project and see it through. We all speak the same QI language. I dread to think what would happen if we didn’t have this in place during this awful time. By having this process, it has empowered ALL staff to speak up and give permission for frontline staff to improve processes where they work. Our executive leadership team have done an amazing job in such a small amount of time. They have increased ITU capacity, they have reshaped rotas, redeployed staff, re employed staff, transformed patient pathways (red and green pathways), pooled staff, set up systems for donations… There has been so much achieved in a short amount of time; the top-level organisation has been incredible. All this in seven days. They have been phenomenal at strategy, planning and overall management and leadership of what I call ‘the big stuff’. What they are not so good at is the ‘small stuff’. We, frontline workers are brilliant at this. The practicalities of work – where can I don and doff, where the bins should be, how do I know this bed has been cleaned? What do we do when someone dies? Can relatives visit? How do we know who is who in PPE? How can we make sure we don’t contaminate clean areas? How do we take blood now? We know what needs to be improved, we know what is missing. It’s the small details that worries staff, it’s the small details that can save lives. As I was walking seeing patients from different wards, I heard staff saying – this isn’t right – we could improve that. They can raise a ticket on the huddle board and they could initiate the change. If the change could be replicated else where in the Trust, the Matron or ward manager can then raise it at the Bronze meeting, the bronze would then raise it to Silver and then implemented. I often hear that we use a top down, bottom up approach but never really thought it works, as there is so much red tape involved in healthcare. Quite often frontline ideas never reach the top level and they fall flat. This time it’s very different. To test the system, you need to stress the system. This system of QI and communication is working. We are all learning together. None of us have dealt with a pandemic before. Frontline staff have been given the permission to improve the way real work is done, quickly and safely, while the top-level management are concentrating on strategy, planning, implementation and co-ordination of services. We are listening to each other, we are rapidly changing and adapting, the whole Trust is in a constant state of PDSA cycles. It feels dynamic, proactive and controlled. If this pandemic happened 10 years ago in our trust, I am convinced that we would not be in the position we are now. We have enough intensive care beds, we have the capacity to expand further, we are ready.