Practice360

FAQs

What areas does Practice360 cover?

The tool is focused around the following sections:

1. Vision and values

2. Leadership

3. Communication

4. Support and wellbeing

5. Professional development

6. Workload

7. Recognition and reward

These are all deliberately non-clinical and are not about practice ‘standards’ as there are already well-established official inspection regimes that cover these. Instead, Practice360 focuses on the practice as an organisation and what it is like to work there on a day-to-day basis.

What is in each section?

Each section contains 5 statements designed to uncover the perceptions of staff

They are required to rate each statement from 1 - 5 depending on how strongly they agree or disagree with each statement.

Also, at the end of each of the 7 sections is an encouragement for staff to suggest one thing that could be done to improve things

Why should I care what staff think or feel?

Because without staff you have no business.

And without happy and motivated staff who feel valued and appreciated and who are invested in the success of the practice you will:

• lose good staff

• waste money on regularly recruiting and training new staff

• lose client loyalty as trusted faces disappear

• squander the opportunities and potential that fostering and nurturing a close team of committed professionals offers to grow and sustain your business. 
  

But what if they criticise us and the way we do things?

Each of the 35 statements included in Practice360 is stated in positive terms, for example:

“I feel part of a supportive team that works well together on a day-to-day basis”

These are all designed to encourage reflection from a positive perspective.  The only free text fields are those areas at the end of each section which are deliberately focused around generating ideas for improvement, rather than encouraging criticism.

Of course, staff do have the option to ‘strongly disagree’ with any of the statements.  And yes, this might make for difficult reading. 

But remember staff will still be feeling that way, whether you have given the opportunity to declare it or not. 

Surfacing criticisms, seeking to understand what might lie behind them and actively working to improve things are all highly likely to make things better; putting a lid on them, ignoring them and hoping they might go away will only make them worse.

We can’t please everyone. Won’t it just lead to further frustration?

Of course, not every problem can be solved, nor every idea taken forward. But often multiple individual problems and issues have the same root causes.  The data produced from Practice360 is designed to help identify those root causes. 

But hopefully, obtaining this data is just the start.  The real value comes when practice leadership teams then work together with staff from across the practice to discuss, prioritise, decide and deliver changes that will make a real and positive difference. 

Changes decided and agreed on based on consultation and consensus are far more likely to be adopted and to last than decisions that appear to have been enforced ‘from above’

So how does the process work?

Practice360 is delivered via an online platform. 

It should take staff no longer than 15 minutes to complete.  It may be worth allocating people a little extra time during a lunchtime or other slot in the working day to devote to this, or of course it could be done at home. We usually suggest keeping the tool open for between 7-10 days.

Once the data is in we will review the data, looking for those significant findings, especially where views seem to differ between leaders and staff (yes, leaders get to complete it too - that’s a critical part of the analysis as it helps to establish how closely aligned your view is with your staff).

There are two options open to you:

Will we find out who said what?

No.  The data will be collected anonymously.  This is vital to encourage honesty and build trust into the process.

We will collect data on roles (practice leader, vet, nurse, support staff) and branch (where appropriate) as this is important for the analysis, but will only be reported back in units of 5 or more.  Where there are fewer than 5, data will be combined into meaningful groupings of 5 or more. E.g. if you have the results from 7 vets and 6 nurses, we will provide the full results from vets and nurses separately.  But if you only have 3 vets and 4 nurses we might combine these categories into a ‘clinical’ response unit of 7.

Will staff see the report?

That’s up to you!  We would certainly encourage openness and would hope that as the starting point for a collective journey across the practice that you will want to share some outputs from the process, but how much and when is something that can be discussed.

What happens next?

Once you receive the report and its findings the rest is up to you! 

The debrief meeting included in Option B of the Practice360 package is designed to help inform your thinking around next steps.  We can offer advice and suggest ways forward, but it is entirely up to you and whichever colleagues you want to bring into the discussion as to where you go next and what help you might need along the way.

What additional support can SPACE provide to us?

There is no ‘one size fits all’ model following in the wake of the data collected through the Practice360 process. 

The diagram below outlines the three main phases which practices are likely to need to consider and includes some examples of how we can help with them if needed.  But the detail of the how, the who, the where and the when will always be unique to each practice.