About Q
We are a membership community collaboratively accelerating the improvement of care in the UK and Ireland. We learn together, support each other and share insights to address health system challenges.
Formed by the Health Foundation and NHS England in 2015, Q connects members to capture the ideas, experience and energy to bring about change that supports high quality care for all. It is free to join.
Together, to improve health and care
Everyone should have access to high quality health care. Right now, they don’t.
We know there are thousands of people working hard to change this. But without connections between them, we lose the ideas and energy needed to solve the complex challenges we face.
In the Q community, we navigate these challenges together. Through learning and collaboration, we make faster progress to improve the safety and quality of health and care for everyone, every day.
As a community, we work towards our vision of an embedded culture and practice of improvement supporting high quality care for all.
Tap into a wealth of knowledge
Q thrives on members’ diverse range of skills, knowledge and perspectives that span health, care and lived experience. With these cross-sector connections, we can learn from what works, find support and ideas, and collaborate to address pressing health system challenges. By sharing insight, skills and ideas widely, we bring about individual and collective change that extends far beyond our community.
“There’s such a wealth of knowledge…within Q, across all aspects of health and outside of health. What is there not to value about that? You can’t buy that sort of knowledge and information off people.”
Free to join
Membership of Q is free, and members benefit from:
- networking and events
- shared resources
- topic-focused groups
- peer learning
- collaborative funding programmes.
The origins of Q
Q began as an initiative to recruit ‘5,000 safety fellows’ following a recommendation in the widely respected 2013 Berwick report. [ref]National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England. A promise to learn – a commitment to act. Improving the Safety of Patients in England. August 2013[/ref]
The report, which was published in the wake of the failings at Mid-Staffordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, made the case for a system devoted to continual learning and improvement.
As a result, NHS England approached the Health Foundation to lead the design and delivery of an initiative dedicated to that aim across the UK. The decision was made to expand beyond patient safety to cover all domains of quality in line with the Institute of Medicine’s definition of quality: safe, effective, patient-centred, timely, efficient and equitable.
To ensure it met the needs of those in the community, Q was co-designed with 231 founding members in 2015. We continue to involve members in the ongoing design of Q, its offers and its activities.
In 2020, Q expanded to Ireland.
Working in partnership
Q is led by the Health Foundation and funded by health service partners across the UK and Ireland. We deliver programmes in partnership with other organisations. Regional improvement organisations also play a role in supporting Q members locally.
Discover more
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Impact and evaluation
4 minute readWhat difference does Q make to health and care services, and how do we measure this? -
All the latest news from the Q community and across health care improvement.