Children’s Health Ireland Support Staff through Coronavirus

Press release: 20th May 2020

Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) is responsible for the delivery of acute paediatric services for children, provided in the three Dublin children’s hospital locations at Crumlin, Temple Street and Tallaght and a paediatric outpatient and urgent care centre based on the campus at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown.

With over 4,000 people working in CHI across five locations, most are not desk-based; communication and sharing information has therefore been a challenge. The development of the new organisation, bringing three hospitals together into one on 1 January 2019 and the opening of CHI at Connolly in July 2019 also increased the need to communicate better and to engage teams through these organisational and cultural changes.  

To meet the challenges, Trevor Murphy, Director of Human Resources started to look at ways in which staff and management in individual hospitals and the change programme could more effectively communicate and share information with each other.

The need for effective communication and information sharing reached a critical point with the spread of COVID-19 bringing new challenges to CHI to communicate in a timely and pervasive means with their staff. Trevor evaluated several options before deciding to proceed with Thrive. Within three weeks, CHI were up and running, using Thrive’s communication platform and app, which has be branded ‘MyCHI’, with ongoing assistance from the Thrive team.

Commenting on the new app for staff MyCHI, Trevor Murphy, Director of Human Resources said ‘A massive and sincere thanks to all the Thrive team for ‘the can do’ attitude in assisting us in launching our employee app MyCHI. It is hugely welcomed by all as a great support for communicating key and important updates, information and supports for our staff at this very difficult time.

The initial feedback from staff has been overwhelmingly positive and we are excited to roll it out to our staff across all our sites, in particularly those who are working remotely due to the current guidelines on physical and social distancing

With our programme for change in preparation for our move to the new children’s hospital and the current health crisis we are facing, there has never been a more important time for us to ensure our colleagues are connected, sharing and receiving important information and feel fully supported and recognised.'

Team Thrive are delighted to help and welcome CHI as a new client and we look forward to working with their team to ensure their employee communications app is engaging and reaching all team members in these challenging times.

James Scott CEO, Co-Founder of Thrive said ‘During this time of uncertainty, effective communication is vital. We are so happy that the Thrive platform and app are genuinely helping people and organisations during this challenging time. We have made adjustments to our contracts and pricing in order to be as flexible as possible to help as many organisations as we can and are delighted to have CHI join our client base.'

-ENDS-

Children’s Health Ireland (CHI)

Who are we?  On 1 January 2019 - the three Dublin children’s hospitals and the Children’s Hospital Group transitioned from four separate, independently governed entities into one new single organisation, Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) to govern and operate local paediatric services for the Greater Dublin Area and all national paediatric specialist services, some of which are on an all-island basis. Our hospital locations are at Crumlin, Temple Street, Tallaght and since July 2019 at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown.

What do we do? One quarter of our population are children under 18 years of age. The majority are healthy, but 1/4 of three year olds are obese, 16% of our children have a chronic disease, such as, diabetes, allergies and asthma. 2% are acutely ill or have complex care needs

CHI currently has a staff of 3,600 delivering care annually to 334,500 children, young people and their families through 39 clinical specialities and 442 in-patient & day care beds

About Thrive

The Thrive platform improves communication with front line staff, builds a stronger team, creates a community, nurtures talent, shares success and supports leadership. Its client-base includes councils, healthcare companies, manufacturing businesses, food firms, retailers and other organisations across the UK, Ireland and internationally. 

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