Empowering Teams, Enhancing Care
Improving residential health and care services using evidence-based
insights from social science
About Noticing Normal
What we do
Why choose us
How we do it
At Noticing Normal, we help organisations learn about the everyday problems staff encounter at work, including the 'normal' ones no-one notices. Because it's often the everyday issues and interactions - the 'normal way' things are done - that determine sustainable performance.
How we do it
Why choose us
How we do it
We offer evaluations and seminars on the key social factors that influence workplace culture. Working across all levels and roles of an organisation, we help staff learn about evidence-based insights that can enhance individual staff awareness and overall organisational performance.
Why choose us
Why choose us
Why choose us
Numerous incident investigations in health and care services, as well as regulators such as the CQC, have repeatedly highlighted the need for collective improvement and not the blaming of individuals. We focus on the behaviours and processes organisations need to help make this a reality.
about social science
What is it and why is it important?
Social science (or social psychology) looks at how groups of people think and behave when they're together rather than when on their own. Usually when something goes wrong it's analysed from the perspective of individual people, when in fact we actually spend a lot of our time in a shared environment with others. The types of environment and interaction vary, from the people we are closest to such as family and friends, to people we know such as colleagues and acquaintances, through to strangers we see or interact with in public or online. Social science tries to understand these different interactions and how they impact certain group behaviours, as well as how the groups in turn influence the individuals within them.
How does it apply to organisations?
Workplaces are complex social environments made up of different kinds of relationships and interactions. For example, the way someone might interact with a manager, or in a meeting, is likely to be different from how they interact with a peer or an informal conversation. Moreover, staff from one area of the organization will probably experience distinct problems and pressures to those from another area. Understanding how people behave in these different situations can give important insights into team performance as well as into individual stress and wellbeing. This knowledge can be useful in helping to create a more productive - and healthy - workplace.
Is it relevant to health care?
Health and care organisations are very 'social' - lots of people from different professions and levels of experience work together to deliver a joined up service. The CQC describes a closed culture as one that “can lead to harm, including human rights breaches such as abuse” where patients are more likely to be at risk of deliberate or unintentional harm. No-one in a hospital or care home can do their job on their own, but when things go wrong the focus can often be on the individual. Although this bias has been recognised for years, the solutions - such as duty of candour, whistleblowing protections, speaking up guardians - have still tended to focus on the individual rather than recognise the wider social factors that make change difficult.
Is it quality improvement (QI)?
Not directly, no. In health and care services the term "improvement" has generally come to mean "applying a systematic approach to solving a complex issue, involving the people closest to the issue in discovering new solutions, testing these and learning through the use of data" (National Clinical Director for NHS Improvement, NHSE). However, the experience of QI in health and care settings has been mixed, often because changing the ways in which people work together is hard. Instead, social science provides organisations a lens through which they can step back and look at the underlying factors, often for the first time, that are necessary to help create an improvement-friendly culture.