1st Annual UIMPROVE Facilitators Conference, May 2007

14-15 May 2007 saw around 50 UIMPROVE Facilitators gather in leafy Cheshire for the 1st Annual UIMPROVE Facilitators Conference. The event was a great success and it is difficult to convey on a website the positivity of the whole two days.

This page focuses on the speakers but we also had a number of interactive and group sessions. We have selected video highlights from each speaker. Please note that the videos are not meant to be professional quality. We have produced them ourselves. They are no substitute for attending!

Doug Cresswell, Chief Executive, Pure Innovations Transforming an organisation using UIMPROVE

Doug is a relative newcomer to UIMPROVE. He had heard good things about the approach and adopted it for his organisation last year. He has put all his senior team through an intensive programme of training, transformed the organisational structure and corporate planning processes and trained up a pool of Facilitators. Doug has found this resource so useful, he is about to train another 12. Pure Innovations are a unique and cutting edge organisation and as well as providing services to a very vulnerable group of people, they run more cafes than McDonalds and have their own radio station, Pure FM.

Fiona Wilkie - Director of Performance and Review & Annette O'Connor - Quality Audit Manager, Cobalt Housing Making the Best Use of our Facilitators

If you visit our photo gallery and go back to 1998, the first year in which we started posting photos, you'll find several photos of Fiona. A practitioner of 10 years, Fiona has been instrumental in promoting the use of Facilitators in Cobalt Housing. Fiona explains how she is putting all that experience to good use in her organisation. Annette, by contrast, only joined Cobalt recently. Amongst her other responsibilities, Annette administers the process for allocating Facilitators to assignments and runs the Facilitator Network.

Sarah Sturmey, Pure Innovations Kick-starting a Major Project

What is remarkable about the work that Sarah has been doing? One answer is nothing. A better answer is that Sarah ran a highly successful Kick-Start for a major project tackling a potentially contentious issue. Sarah reminds us how to do things properly and the outcomes you get as a result.

Pat Birt and Helen Nelson, Wirral Hospital NHS Trust Improving the Patient Experience for Blind/Partially Sighted People

The NHS is currently awash with rhetoric about Patient Involvement. This is the best example we have ever come across about really involving the patient in a structured and participative way. The topic was extremely sensitive, the participants had all been through a traumatic experience and now some Facilitators wanted them to write on post-its and cluster the results! This is a top-class case study.

Mark Hendry, c2c A Project Story

Shy and retiring Mark Hendry works for C2C who run the trains from London out to Essex. Mark took us through the Communication in Times of Disruption Project. This was a project that had been tried many times before without much success. Mark brought a facilitated and structured approach to bear with remarkable results.