BLOG: Hacking the NHS

By Cathy Sloan, Improvement Advisor, Advancing Quality Alliance (AQuA)

Cathy Sloan, Improvement Advisor

What the heck is a hackathon you might ask? I did too a couple of weeks ago when I volunteered for Hackathon Facilitator Training in London with NHS England's Sustainable Development Team ahead of the NHS Transformathon. I'd heard the odd thing about Hacks being used in healthcare and was intrigued to find out what all the fuss was about.

For those who don't know, Hacks started in the IT as a way of bringing together programmers and developers to intensively collaborate on a project. These marathon sessions generally last 24 hours (fuelled by vast quantities of pizza, energy and beer!) as open, creative events with no ideas off the table. I was particularly interested in what facilitation skills are needed to run a good Hack and how this differs from facilitating regular health improvement event.

Hackathons are increasingly being used outside IT to bring a diverse range of people together to develop ideas, improve and solve issues in a fast-paced, creative environment. However they're still typically structured around a rough theme, e.g. improving flow, and are broken down into a number of smaller sprints:

• Sprint 1: Describe the ideal situation - how will you know when you're there? What will you see, feel, know and do?
• Sprint 2: What gets in the way now?
• Sprint 3: Mini group hacks to creatively achieve the ideal, gather ideas, suggestions, and creative solutions
• Sprint 4: Clustering the mini hacks to build these ideas, aggregate thinking and develop creative ways forward

For the NHS Transformathon NHS South Cheshire and Vale Royal CCGs held their own 24 hour Hackathon across two days. This examined the problems with their current health and care model as they look to shift care from hospitals to the community, particularly with moving money around the system whilst maintaining performance.

On day one attendees were given a brief outline of these issues and were asked to form teams to devise potential solutions. Feedback from the day was really positive and it was great to see such a diverse mix of people present; from service users, local industry (including luxury car manufacturer Bentley), the fire service, as well as people from across the whole of the NHS and social services. Whilst many were sceptical to start off with, most were quickly won over; with a number of key ideas emerging and commenting on how much energy there was in the room!

On day two I was ready to put my newly-acquired facilitator skills to use and was raring to go for an early start (that first cup of tea was much needed), as were a number of participants who had stayed over at the venue. As things got going teams were asked to pitch ideas from day one to a dragons’ den-style panel. The winning pitch would then be supported by the North West Coast Academic Health Science Network (NWC AHSN) to take the idea forward.

Among my teammates it was apparent there were a number of local and national system issues that were causing them problems, making it tough to ready a pitch against the clock. Whilst a few more people on the team without a vested interest might have provided a bit more perspective, reflecting on my role as facilitator I probably should have recognised this (and will do on my next Hack).

With a bit of a push and a quick overview of the 30, 60, 90 methodology, the team quickly developed a pitch which was ably delivered by one of our GP teammates. As the whole Hack came together to pitch, this was a really interesting process and was taken very seriously. A total of 4 pitches were delivered to the panel of senior leaders. After their lunchtime deliberations, to our amazement (given the speed we'd pulled together our pitch) our team won!

Looking back at my Hathathon experience, particularly the Central Cheshire Hack, this was such a good event full of energy and enthusiasm. I was really surprised how different the pitches were; from a life course wellbeing app encouraging and enabling self-management, to a collaborative approach to medicines management and budgeting.

The hack process definitely encourages people to think creatively and collaborate to solve problems. Speaking to other participants after the event, one of the things they seemed to value the most was having the time away from the day-to-day to be able to think and create with new people. One attendee in particular loved how some of the non-NHS people were also able to hold a mirror up to existing systems and processes and really challenge the way things are done in the NHS.

I really enjoyed my first experiences of a hack and am keen to give it another go. They bring a real spark of creativity by doing things differently and may well bring some of the different solutions needed in the NHS.

You can watch the full video from NHS South Cheshire & Vale Royal’s Hack here.