Celebrating staff mentioned by name using Subscriber Tagging & GREATix

My name is Mairead Casey and together with my colleague Christine Armstrong, we are part of the Patient Client Experience (PCE) Team in Southern Health and Social Care Trust (SHSCT), and our role is to support staff in the Trust to implement Care Opinion into the services they run and embed into the culture of SHSCT.

Recently within the team we have noticed an increase in the number of stories where the story authors have taken the time to remember and mention our staff by name, and we believe this is such an accolade for our staff to receive. Many of these stories demonstrate where our staff have went over and above, encompassing our core Trust values to provide a wonderful service to our patients and service users.

During our reporting Q3 in 2024-2025, out of 431 stories shared publicly a massive 155 Trust staff were mentioned personally by name – click here .We track these staff by using the 'Subscriber Tagging' feature on Care Opinion and tag these stories with the Tag 'Staff mentioned by name'. We felt that it would be wonderful if staff could be recognised for this, and one way we thought of was through the Trusts GREAT-ix system.

‘Learning from Excellence’ is a growing movement nationally which encourages staff to learn lessons across all aspects of our patients’ care and experience. The GREAT-ix system is an initiative to allow NHS staff to say thank you to each other and help make their colleagues feel valued and appreciated. Submitting a GREAT-ix aims to capture the positive events in the NHS and improve safety by sharing and spreading excellence.

We linked up with our colleague, Dr Laure Martin who is the lead for implementation of GREATix in Southern Health and Social Care Trust. We developed a simple 4 step guide which would make it easy for managers to nominate staff/teams who have been ‘mentioned by name’ in a ‘positive way’ in a Care Opinion story.

To ensure that all staff were aware of the new GREAT-ix process a Standard of Practice (SoP) was developed. We circulated the SoP to all staff via a global email. To further embed this new process, we plan to incorporate the poster below in our next Working Together Newsletter:

We want the story author to be aware that we have issued a GREAT-ix so they too can see the value the Trust places on positive feedback.  We therefore have requested that managers, in their response, include the fact that they have nominated the person for a GREAT-ix. We have also provided a draft response as a guide for staff, see below:

A pilot occurred in our Trust for a period of 3 months in our non-acute settings to ensure that the SoP was working. This was beneficial as it highlighted issues with the SoP in relation to noting a GREATix as a ‘change made’, which was deemed as not appropriate. The SoP was then updated to reflect same.

We hope moving forward that we will see an increase in the number of staff, who are mentioned personally by name, and are nominated for a GREATix. In order to facilitate this, as advised in the SoP, managers issuing a GREATix are to copy a member of the PCE team into the e-mail.

This will enable the PCE team to tag the story accordingly, allowing us to keep a track of the number of GREATix awards issued, and will assist with reporting on same.

It is early days.. but we are excited to see how this progresses.