Organisational development with Moorfields Eye Hospital

The challenge

In 2023, we ran a co-creation project bringing together patients, clinicians and administrative staff to develop “See the Whole Person”, a set of Patient Experience Principles for the Trust. In our next steps recommendations, we emphasised the importance of supporting and equipping staff across the Trust to lead for these principles and to embed them in all areas of work - from clinical to administration, research to education. 

Our approach

Rather than develop a training manual or toolkit to help embed the principles, we proposed equipping and supporting staff to explore the principles in their own day-to-day practice, without being too prescriptive about what ‘good’ looks like. We convened a group of pioneering teams in a community of practice (‘Action Lab’), to work over an 8-week period to build the principles into their daily work.

We structured the process around group workshops, 1-to-1 coaching sessions with our team and a series of Action Learning Sets where any member of the team could bring an issue or challenge to the wider group and receive peer coaching and support.

At the end of the process, we ran a reflection session for the group to identify their key learnings, before running The Big Share; a session where the group, in their own words, presented their learnings back to the Trust’s Executive Leadership team, with advice on how to embed the principles across all staff members at the trust. 

Impact and learning

The project shifted the usual ways of working at Moorfields, equipping staff - particularly those in junior roles - with the agency and support to test new ideas and collaborate for change in the patient experience. Participants described the experience as “transformative” and “the way things should be done”. 

Following the Action Lab pilot, Moorfields committed to rolling out “See the Whole Person” as a way of working across the trust, through a series of Action Labs. In 2024/25 a further four Action Labs were delivered at Moorfields by in-house teams, with further rollouts planned in future. 

The Patient Experience Principles project and Action Lab methodology was shortlisted for the Personalisation of Care award by the National Patient Experience Network in 2024 as well as being presented as a poster at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, in London in 2024.