What is Quality Improvement and why do it?
Patient safety is the driver for all quality improvement (QI) work, as we know that despite the extraordinary hard work of healthcare professionals, patients are unintentionally harmed in healthcare every day.
Healthcare-acquired infections, pressure ulcers and medication errors are examples of harm that is unintended and referred to as avoidable harm.
QI is a proactive approach to improving patient (and population) outcomes, system performance and professional development. It is about understanding where we are and striving for continuous improvement in order to make our care even better and even safer.
QI promotes changes in behaviours, working together, creative thinking, and fundamentally, using measurement to guide improvement.
Northampton General Hospital aims to reduce avoidable harm year on year and through QI we are empowering and supporting all staff to implement QI projects; big or small, to consistently enhance the quality of the service we provide.
Who should do QI?
In short, everyone!
Delivering a safe and high quality service requires contribution from all staff of all disciplines, grades, and departments. Without a team approach, it’s much more difficult to make a significant improvement to the care we deliver every day.
The best ideas most often come from those working ‘on the shop floor’. When you work in the same place every day, you will most probably be the individual who notices an area for improvement, as well as way you think would make things better.
If there is a process that you think could/should be improved in order to improve efficiency or reduce risk or harm, then get in touch! Our team works with staff across all divisions to support QI projects.
Staff Training
The QI and Patient Safety (QIPS) team offer a range of courses, covering not only Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, but also topics such as leadership, human factors and data. These courses offer personal and professional development and many of them are also CPD accredited which will support professional revalidation.
Please see our prospectus here for full details. Hyperlink to prospectus
Resources
Project Proposal Template (PPT) Hyperlink to PPT
This form is completed in order to register a QI project with our team.
The PPT can be completed with support from the QI team if you are unsure what to put in each section.
All QI project proposals will be uploaded to LifeQI. This is an online QI database which as project lead you will be given a log in for. It will enable you to have instant access to all your improvement project work, wherever you are. As well as being able to store and access all of your documents, it will allow you to score the progress of your project, giving both you and the organisation a complete overview of how your project is evolving. There are various report functions so that directorates, divisions and the Trust as a whole have oversight of all the QI projects and duplication can be avoided.
Patient Involvement
We are committed to involving patients and the wider local community in all of the work that we do to ensure that the patients’ voice is heard, and is a key component of all improvement work. We do this by employing patient and family partners; these individuals are registered volunteers with a keen interest in improving the experience of our patients. If this is something that would interest you then please see further information here.
Contact
If you have any questions for us – please send us an email: ngh-tr.qi@nhs.net or call 01604 523429 (Internal ext: 3429).