I have been involved with the Productive Ward, designed by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, from the very beginning of its development, and personally launched the initiative at the Royal College of Nursing conference in 2007. Since then, I have kept a close interest in its progress.

I am well aware of the frustrations experienced by staff who are dedicated to the care of patients but are prevented from spending time with them because working practices are inefficient or outdated. The Productive Ward offers a practical and common sense approach, which empowers ward teams to redesign their own processes and enables them to deliver better care.

Since the Productive Ward was piloted and rolled out to hospitals all over the country, I have met and spoken to a number of nurses who have found their working lives transformed by its ethos and have benefited from having access to the practical improvement tools.

They have told me that by involving the whole team in looking at their systems and finding ways of reducing the time spent on activities, such as paperwork, handovers and searching for equipment, they have significantly increased the amount of time available for patient care.

Health ministers have taken a keen interest in this work, regularly visiting hospital sites running the Productive Ward. They were impressed not only by the difference this programme made to working practices, but also by the enthusiasm of the staff implementing the changes.

As a result, the health secretary Alan Johnson announced last year that£50m has been set aside for trusts across the country to take advantage of the Productive Ward programme.

The changing needs and expectations of patients has led to different approaches to delivering healthcare and nurses have played a pivotal role in these changes. As their role evolves, the day-to-day organisation of wards must change to ensure that they are able to spend as much time as possible on patient care.

We are now seeing the principles on which the Productive Ward is based being translated into other areas of the health service: across mental health and community services, for example. It is even being taken into the boardroom, through the Productive series. Empowering staff to drive forward improvements in the health service on the front line is a cornerstone of health minister Lord Darzi's ongoing review of the NHS. The Productive Ward demonstrates the benefits of this approach to health reform: clinically driven and locally led.

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