Hello all,

 

Debra Thornton has kindly been in touch with some detail of her experience with this role that I am sharing with permission.

 

My thanks to her.

 

Alan

 

 

 

Hi Alan,

I can’t say I’ve had complete success with the TKO concept – mainly because nobody really knows what they’re supposed to do! But this is what I did:

·         I had a chat with our Director of HR & OD about Knowledge Management and TKOs / CKO. He is a great supporter of the library and knowledge management since he is responsible for funding us! He agreed to be the CKO and, although I only formally meet with him very occasionally, he is very supportive of any projects I want to pursue (e.g the Management Librarian project that you questioned me about at HLG). Since he is a very dynamic personality and a well-liked Director this was a great start.

·         Feb 2009 – I organised a half day workshop to introduce the role. I invited several speakers (including the CKO) who were interested or had experience of KM projects and included a brief training session on appraisal (of web information rather than detailed critical appraisal) and an audience participation session on sharing best practice. This generated quite a lot of interest and I asked all those present (about 30) if they would agree to become TKOs. Since no-one disagreed they were all added to my mailing list of TKOs / KM and I e-mail them regularly with library news, surveys, current awareness bulletins etc.

·         I chair a quarterly Knowledge Management Group meeting to which I invite all the TKOs, plus the Head of Clinical Governance, Clinical Effectiveness Manager, Clinical Governance Managers from various directorates, Clinical Risk Manager, R&D Manager. All of these have attended at least one meeting in the last year. I have also invited the CKO but he hasn’t managed to attend yet and I don’t really think we have enough content at the meeting for it to be worth his time. At the meetings we discuss library issues  (new evidence, bulletins etc) and each person present is encouraged to update us on best practice in their area. The main theme of the meetings is sharing best practice, learning lessons from incidents and reporting service improvements (see below). We get around 8 – 10 people attending each meeting.

·         Service Improvements (Quality Improvements). We have a KM webpage on our intranet and we add Quality Improvement Case Studies to this whenever we can, following the example of CGST (now defunct) and NHS Institute. These improvement stories can come from the TKOs, Clinical Governance meetings, Clinical Improvement meetings or from anyone who has introduced a new way of working that has improved practice.

·         One thing I have found is that if I mention ‘our TKO network’ in other meetings people such as the Risk Manager and Clinical Governance managers see this as a way of getting messages out about other things and so I have been asked to become involved in Lessons Learned work (learning from reported incidents); Patient Experience projects; Equality and Diversity and special one-off projects around the Trust such as the Department of Health’s Rapid Steps Programme around nutrition.

 

I think your ‘expert user’ concept is good – I found that most people who are interested in KM tend to be regular users of the library resources anyway and act as champions for our service.

 

I hope this is helpful and if you have any other ideas I would be grateful to hear them. The biggest problem, of course, is finding the time to implement anything new!

Kind regards,

Debra