Helen’s story

Having been one of the early pioneers of quality improvement in the NHS from 1991 onwards, Helen has consistently had a role at the forefront of large scale NHS improvement initiatives that have made an impact for thousands of people and changed the way that health and care systems around the world go about improvement.

Early in her NHS career, Helen led the Leicester Royal Improvement Re-engineering Programme, one of the most ambitious improvement projects ever undertaken in a healthcare organisation. It won the Hewlett Packard Golden Helix Award for the best healthcare innovation initiative in Europe. In 1998, Helen was asked to become a national NHS leader of improvement, joining the National Patients Access Team which worked with every hospital across England, seeking to reduce waiting time for patients through practical improvement approaches. Helen set up the Cancer Services Collaborative, one of the first large scale, systemic approaches to clinical improvement in the UK. In the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list 2001, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Healthcare.

Helen was one of the founding leaders of the NHS Modernisation Agency in 2001. From the early 2000’s she developed an interest in applying social movement principles to scale up organisational change. In 2004, she led the development of the 10 High Impact Changes for Service Improvement and Delivery which were a distillation of key learning from the work the NHS Modernisation Agency did with hundreds of frontline NHS organisations. The changes were implemented by healthcare teams across the UK and adapted by other nations. They led to a “10 high impact” approach in many areas of care including services for older people, General Practice, and integrated care.

In 2005, Helen became a leader of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. She led the team that conceived, co-designed and implemented Releasing Time to Care, the NHS Productive Series, which the Director at the Department of Health responsible for improvement described as “probably the strongest product in the world for driving change in providers (of healthcare)”. The first in the series, The Productive Ward, Releasing Time to Care, was adopted by over 80% of English hospitals. It was well evaluated, and its implementation shown to deliver improvements in productivity, agency, and efficiency in many settings. It was adopted by healthcare systems globally including those in Australia Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the USA as well as in all the home nations of the UK. In 2008, the 60^th anniversary of the NHS, Helen was named as one of the 60 most influential people in the history of the NHS by The Health Service Journal.

In 2009, Helen established the NHS Academy for Large Scale Change with Paul Plsek and Lynne Winstanley. The aim was to build the capability of system leaders from across the country to lead large scale, transformational change. Their manual “Leading large scale change, a practical guide”, updated and reissued in 2018, has influenced the change practice of thousands of leaders within and beyond the health and care sector.

In 2013, Helen founded NHS Change Day with a group of young clinical and managerial leaders from the NHS. It was the largest day of voluntary collective action to improve healthcare services in the history of the NHS and spread to 21 other countries and territories around the world. NHS Change Day won a global “Leaders Everywhere” award from Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation Exchange, sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company.

In 2014, Helen led the establishment of the School for Health and Care Radicals that subsequently became the School for Change Agents. This is a virtual school for people in health and care and beyond to build their skills for change. It is the largest online learning community based within the NHS, with more than 100,000 people from 60 countries having taken part. External evaluators have described the school as “a relevant and powerful intervention” and “a genuine asset for the NHS” that has been shown to build increased understanding of change, sense of motivation and purpose, and helped people to grapple with change problems that they had thought were intractable.

In 2015, Helen founded the NHS Horizons team, a small group of change agents within the NHS. The many initiatives that Helen has supported through the Horizons team include crowdsourcing novel solutions to help increase Coronavirus testing methods, supplies and capacity across England; building the capacity of local change leaders in health and care to co-create actionable change with thousands of participants; creating ways for people working at the frontline in every ambulance service in the UK to contribute to innovation and improvement; and convening a deliberative community of leaders to develop a 15 year forward view for the health and care workforce in England.

In 2022, Helen decided that she needed to come out of her comfort zone as a full time internal change leader in the NHS and to build a wider portfolio of work. Now she works with the NHS Horizons team as a Strategic Advisor on a part time basis and spends the rest of her time in her own practice, supporting local and international leaders in their change efforts; giving keynote addresses; and spreading the word on effective change practice by expanding her social influence and thought leadership activities.