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How the Q community can contribute to the implementation of the 10 Year Health Plan

Our recent workshop gathered insight including what is needed to utilise the full benefit of Q and the improvement movement.

The 10 Year Health Plan for the NHS is scheduled to launch in spring 2025, focusing on three shifts: from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention, and from analogue to digital. Improvement skills and approaches will be crucial to implementing the plan and sustaining effective delivery of change. Our community has the skills, networks and credibility needed in realising these ambitions. 

Paul Corrigan, a senior advisor within DHSC working on the plan, invited Q to share the expertise and experience within our community to draw out the role improvement methods can play. He asked how Q and the improvement movement can carry out the task of supporting the three shifts. This was explored during a workshop in November. The insight gathered from our panel of six improvement leaders together with 67 Q members was then shared with the team leading the plan. 

What is needed to utilise the full benefit of the improvement movement

The Q members who attended the workshop highlighted what would be needed to ensure the full value of improvement approaches could be utilised for successful implementation. They particularly identified the need to: 

Ensure those working on improvement can connect and share learning and insights

The Q community has existing platforms for sharing knowledge and ideas, including peer networks, insight projects, communities of practice and funding programmes – all vital infrastructure for supporting improvement. 

Give those leading improvement greater profile and credibility

Q members are spread across all 42 ICS regions, meaning that well-established capability, experience and dispositional commitment to change can be connected into the system and used to enhance other change capability. 

Evolve core health sector incentives to support effective improvement

Improvement approaches should not just be allowed’, they should be incentivised to support the scale of change needed for the plan. This should include redesigning funding flows, co-designing better incentives, and identifying gaps in capability in the sector.

Develop improvement capability at different levels and across all sectors

Q builds improvement capabilities in networked, supportive and cost-effective ways that can then scale, such as the Quality Coaching Development Programme. We also support improvement capability at a local level through partnerships with NHS Confederation (ICSs) and NHS Providers (Provider Collaboratives). 

Invest in development for organisational and local system leaders

The shifts will require new forms of understanding and behaviour from leaders in order to enable change. A member stressed that, a critical role for leadership is understanding some of the complexities of system change and understanding the barriers that people will come up against when they start to engage in that process of improvement.” 

Embed improvement within self-improving organisations and systems

Quality improvement will need to align with a whole range of other mechanisms in the system. Balancing assurance and improvement through quality management systems and learning health systems will help provide effective ways to manage quality of care through a period of substantial transition. 

Build on existing improvement assets

Building on what is already there is not just cost-effective but the most effective way to support improvement approaches. 

The role of an improvement approach in implementing the 10 Year Health Plan

Throughout the workshop, Q members built the case for improvement’s role in the implementation of the plan, and the Q community’s centrality in enabling and delivery change. Policy levers, structural shifts or financial incentives will be important but not enough to support transformation at this scale. 

Members listed factors that have limited progress so far and called for a new approach to change that is underpinned by improvement methods, mindsets and capabilities. This will support the path to implementation that brings people on the journey and delivers in the long as well as the short term. Specifically, Q could support the ambitions for change by: 

  • Using the Q community’s co-production skills to engage the workforce during the implementation of change
  • Scaling the practical knowledge of co-development workable interventions from programmes like Q Lab and Q Exchange 
  • Enabling the spread of best practice across sectors, professions, and regions through community connections, our website and events 
  • Creating capability for systemic change by bringing together people who have the expertise to lead and support the shifts

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