Taking It All In Their Stride

By Gerry Devine
In
Posted Wednesday June 1, 2022

Taking It All In Their Stride

I have recently been working with Healthier West Wirral PCN, a Primary Care Network with over 71,000 patients, to plan and run an event for representatives from all its practice teams.

The event aimed to:

Reflect on progress so far
Engage with the wider team
Identify potential improvement opportunities
Plan for future success

The PCN also wanted to do something different, that might make a difference and enable the “wisdom in the room” to be fully realised.

Part of the event was to include presentations by the PCN’s health coaches, social prescribing and link teams. These championed the benefits of being active over being sedentary in terms of personal well-being.

The PCN also wanted to demonstrate a commitment to “walking it as they talk it”.

So they decided that an element of the event - one which otherwise might have been more a traditional table top discussion - would be reformatted as a “walk and talk” activity. What with May being “National Walking Month”, the time definitely seemed right to make such a step change.

To make sure the walk and talk activity was both enjoyable and productive, it was structured as follows:

Through an initial icebreaker at the beginning of the event, the larger group was broken up into groups of 5. This meant that people would be walking with colleagues they didn’t know that well, in an effort to both “oil the wheels” of cross-practice communications and promote cross-pollination of ideas.
Each group of 5 had to identify a timekeeper, who set their mobile phone alarm to tell them when they needed to return to the room. Also nominated were a note-taker to capture good ideas and a spokesperson who would feed back to the bigger room on their return.
The outcomes expected from each group was that on their return, they needed to have agreed one improvement idea that they would share with the room, and one question that they would ask of the PCN’s leadership team.

One of my practical concerns, as the session facilitator, was that getting people to return to the meeting room once they had been released into the wilds of the very picturesque Ness Gardens might be comparable to “herding cats”.

But I needn’t have worried, as everyone was back in the room at the allotted time. They were seemingly suitably refreshed, as what followed was a very insightful, solution-orientated discussion that produced a number of actionable improvements.

So how did the event go?

Well, I’ll let one of the delegates give you their feedback on that…

“This was so useful and informative. Absolutely brilliant afternoon. Thank you so much.”

If you have a need for a similar event and want to incorporate a “walk and talk” element, then please get in touch and we can help match your needs to our “walk and talk” format.

The event’s traditional format: