Children’s Health selects Belfast’s Thrive

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 communication and sharing information has been a challenge. The development of the new organisation, bringing three hospitals together into one on January 1 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.

CHI evaluated several options before deciding to proceed with Thrive. Within three weeks, CHI was 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.”

James Scott CEO, Co-Founder of Thrive, added: “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.”

Thrive provides software and support to make employee communications easy and cost-effective. Its client-base includes councils, healthcare companies, manufacturing businesses, food firms, retailers and other organisations across the UK, Ireland and internationally. https://thrive.app/

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