Intention

The goal of the MEE Samen project (MEE IJsseloevers and MEE Veluwe) is to strengthen an organization's care and improve quality through the use of social networks. Situations, in which the social network becomes increasingly distant from the client and its potential is not used, are the rule rather than the exception unfortunately.

Recently I heard an example that shows the underlying problem well. A father of one of the clients of a healthcare organization is an accountant and was asked to go to the shopping evening with some of the clients as a volunteer. Whereupon the person concerned indicated that he was good with numbers and was less interested in undertaking an activity with the residents. He came up with the proposal to take over part of the administrative work of the group leadership, so that they could go to the shopping evening themselves. The group leadership indicated that this was organizationally impossible, because supervising activities falls under voluntary work and the administration falls under the duties of the employees of the care institution.

Approach

The approach was to find an organization/group that wanted to do the experiment to explore the social networks (different) to bet. I have approached various healthcare institutions for this, by phone or in the network. At a number of institutions I have had a conversation with drivers, policy officers or team leaders.

Result

I expected that organizations would be curious and willing to participate in a pilot to involve social networks in healthcare in a different way, with added value for all parties.. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth and I don't have the expected pilot results yet. However, there were positive reactions, only it was seen more as something interesting in the long term and not for now. Time, money and the unknown of working with social networks were important barriers. The use of social networks requires a very different way of organizing care for the average care institution.

I have also noticed that people in healthcare do not know and use the circle of influence very well. So that I have to ask even more explicitly how they are in it. I noticed that people often react like this or this is what I am instructed to do.

I did manage to draw attention to the subject within my organization. We have more and more experience with the use of social network reinforcement, for example through the use of client support staff. We also have at the municipality (Language) being able to deploy a tilt coach with a neighborhood team, someone who cares the tilt, towards more control and responsibility on the part of the client and really matching the care with the demand and person, can guide.

As one of the spearheads for 2018 our Training and consultancy department will now focus broadly on healthcare. Which means that from December we will try again to draw attention to the subject more widely.

Lessons

  1. Care providers and organizations appear to find it difficult to deviate from a standard way of working, so you have to create space for that in advance.
  2. There is a lot of shyness in organizations to come into contact with the social networks. They see it more as ballast and think of the 'difficult people’ that they get on top of their workload. How could you as an organization become less 'shy'??
  3. It is necessary to organize support in advance and I could put the idea more compact and catchy on paper (now I did that from the conversation and discussing what the organization encountered.).
  4. It was said that teams could decide for themselves whether to participate. I have learned that teams are not a good point of contact. Before you find out who is responsible for a certain topic within a team, and who actually wants to tackle the topic, are you a little further.

Name: Ria Brands
Organization: MEE

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