How to engage your junior doctors

Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust cite effective junior doctor engagement as a key component to the success of their WTD 2009 pilot project.

What does the project entail?

Inpatients were divided into two streams; emergency/acute short-stay, and elective long-stay. Each stream is cared for and treated by a dedicated team. The emergency acute short-stay team includes junior doctors who are assigned to the team in six week blocks providing a 24 / 7 service. Elective long-stay inpatients are cared for and treated by doctors who work office hours - they are not expected to work evenings, nights or weekends.

Key tips to engagement

Project Board
Homerton’s approach is to ensure that the project board comprises of ‘heavyweight’ players - Chaired by the medical director and includes the operations director, two senior consultants and a junior doctor representative. Meetings are tightly chaired, occur fortnightly and last no more than an hour. With this approach, members of the board know their time will be well used and their time commitment limited.

Communication
Communication is a standing item on the board’s agenda and its pivotal importance is well recognised. Using a broad range of communication avenues to convey ideas and progress, and to encourage brainstorming which can be invaluable in uncovering issues and challenges and play a big part in the engagement and change process itself. Existing formal meetings, including the Medical Council and Clinical Board, are exploited for this purpose. In addition, less formal gatherings such as post graduate lunch meetings are used.

Reference Group
A Reference Group has been established as one of the more formal avenues for exploring ideas and collecting views and fostering engagement. Both consultants and junior doctors are included in the membership of this group, and though in the early stages, progress so far is promising.

Discussion documents
More generally, discussion documents are emailed out, and comment, feedback and views are invited. The emailing tends to be to several professional groups under cover of separate emails. This allows a wider range of people to participate while limiting the ‘risk’ associated with responding to a large group.

Progress updates
Progress updates are also included in the trust’s systematised communication channels - the CEO’s Briefing and a bi-monthly newsletter. The message sent through these channels tends to be broad and general - to match the audience - but it is still an important strand in the overall strategy.

“Engagement does not come easily nor does it come overnight. Our approach has worked so far, and we know we will have to modify it in the future.” James McQuillan, project manager, Homerton.